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December 2000

Staff Editorial
There is hope in an era of Bush.
by the PERSPECTIVE staff

UC Endorsement
Steve Smith and James Coleman are the liberal's choice.
by the PERSPECTIVE staff

Canadian Comrades
It really is better up there.
by Danny Schlozman

Triumph or Tragedy?
Clinton's legacy is one of calculated compromise.
by Jeffrey Theodore

Buying Survival
Africa needs money, now.
by Ved Lekic and Alexandra Neuhaus-Follini

Pharmitas
Pharmaceutical companies fund Harvard research.
by Nathan Perl-Rosenthal

Students for What?
Folic acid has a hidden message.
by Shelby Meyerhoff

Greens Take Root
PERSPECTIVE talks to Cliff Ginn.
by Dev Purkayastha

A Year to Remember
A year from Seattle, the WTO protests go on.
by Bob Elliott

Cry Freedom
America's ideal of freedom is questionable.
by Nikhil Jaikumar

Introspective
In Defense of Money
by Brad Hershbein

Salmagundi

The Back Page
Keeping Christmas
by Julia Silvis

A schoolgirl once asked Pierre Elliott Trudeau “When you lie in bed at night, what do you really think about the problems of the Canadian economy?” The Prime Minister of Canada replied, “When I lie in bed at night, I don't think about the problems of the Canadian economy.” Trudeau, the dominant Canadian of his generation, died at 80 this past October. For the hundreds of thousands who filed past his coffin, his death marked the end of an era, sixteen years when the Prime Minister articulated forcefully (and sometimes zanily) his modernizing vision of a “just society.” Yet, many in western Canada and in Trudeau's home province of Quebec saw less to mourn. In the aftermath of Trudeau's death, his successor and protege, Jean Chretien, called and won a federal election. Despite a strong win for the Liberal Party, great schisms across Canada remain. They bedevil the nation now just as they vexed Pierre Elliott Trudeau.

Any attempt to unravel contemporary Canadian politics begins with its political parties. The Liberals, who won 173 of the 301 ridings (seats) in Parliament in the election on November 27, stand just to the left of center ideologically. The party has a strong commitment to individual rights and liberties, from Trudeau's crusading push for sexual equality and abortion rights, to the more recent enactment of domestic partnership legislation for gays and lesbians, to a strong commitment to due process and the rights of the accused. Economically, the party is split between a hawkish wing, led by the Finance Minister, Paul Martin, and a more classically Keynesian group, whose best-known proponent is probably Brian Tobin, the Industry Minister and former Premier of Newfoundland. Martin's austerity budgets in the mid-1990s brought Canada a fiscal surplus and, combined with impressive cross-border trade with the US, and significantly reduced unemployment, restored macroeconomic health to the nation. Others, especially from impoverished Atlantic Canada, worry that the party may be appealing too much to well-off metropolitan areas at the expense of the rest of the nation. Perhaps surprisingly for such a centrist group, the Liberals are also staunch nationalists, skeptical of ever-closer North American integration and deeply opposed to further devolution to the provinces, let alone the secession of Quebec. The Liberals' leader, Jean Chretien, 66, is the tenth child from a poor family in Quebec. He has served in Parliament since 1963, and maintains an old-fashioned approach to politics: he looks terrible on television, appoints old cronies to government jobs, and prefers backroom discussions to publicized brawls. This style goes over poorly-the Globe & Mail, Canada's most respected broadsheet, pointedly endorsed Paul Martin-and Chretien may be forced to step down before his third term as PM ends in 2004.

Two visions stand opposed to the Liberals, just as they have for the last generation. The first comes from Quebec. The five million French speakers in North America, surrounded by fifty times that number who speak English and without the universalizing experience of a revolution to eliminate their Bourbonist tendencies, have grown restive over the past generation, and their demands for independence have become ever more petulant. Twice, referenda demanding it have failed by narrow margins; the first time, in 1980, Trudeau's impassioned pleas for Canadian union probably made the difference. Nevertheless, the separatist Bloc Quebecois (BQ) continues to press its cause. While Anglophones and cosmopolitans find it reactionary, the BQ polls extremely well throughout the province's hinterland. The party's platform is an odd mix. It praises family- and church-oriented social provision of the type favored by Christian Democrats throughout Europe. It also advocates close ties with the United States, and a currency union with the ROC (rest of Canada) after independence while favoring strict provincial language laws and ascriptive citizenship.

The second opposing vision comes from Western Canada, and is most associated with the oil-rich province of Alberta. Along with defeating the 1980 referendum, Trudeau thought the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms was his greatest accomplishment. In 1982, he negotiated what was effectively a constitution for Canada (although formally it was the replacement for the Dominion Act of 1867). Its strong provisions for individual rights and its commitment to a national role in a federal state alienated many in Canada's conservative Western provinces. More recently, the Reform Party, a right-wing populist party focused on a devolutionary and tax-cutting agenda, emerged in Alberta. With its oil riches and sprawling development, many Canadians deem Alberta the province most like America. Earlier this year, in an attempt to swallow the struggling Progressive Conservatives, the party renamed itself the Canadian Alliance and gained a new leader: 43-year-old former Bible salesman Stockwell Day. He has espoused creationism and strict limits on immigration, supported a private role for health care (heresy in the land of the single-payer), and campaigned on a Steve Forbes-like seventeen percent flat tax to replace Canada's high federal rates.

Two other parties compete for Canadians' votes. The Progressive Conservatives, long the nation's leading center-right party, were decimated after nine corrupt years, from 1984 to 1993, under former PM Brian Mulroney. The Tories soldier on under former PM Joe Clark, who has been outfoxed by every leading Canadian politician of the past generation. Perhaps just so he can call himself the great survivor, he refuses to merge his party with the Alliance. Nevertheless, the party's wet politics seem more reminiscent of halcyon Eisenhower Republicanism or Britain's one-nation Conservatism than any up-and-coming movement.

Finally, we come to the long-suffering New Democrats (NDP). Despite the name, this is Canada's member of the Socialist International, whose candidates are more likely to be factory workers or intellectuals than provincial politicos. The 1990s have been unkind to these old leftists as they have struggled through the growing conservatism of Western Canada, and the torpor that has affected so many movements on the left has kept them struggling to overcome internecine division, and fashion a credible alternative to the Liberals. Nevertheless, despite the lack of a firm of geographic base or a charismatic leader, the struggle continues. As David Berlin, an NDP candidate from Toronto, said “To belong to the NDP today is not simply a political act, it is an act of conscience.”

On these grounds, Chretien called the recent elections. He should be pleased with the results. The Liberals won 173 of 301 ridings, and the Alliance, far from being the enfant terrible of the Canadian party system, managed to pick up only 66 seats, eight more than they had before the election. The Liberals continue to hold 17 seats west of Ontario. Thanks to vote-splitting between the Tories and the Alliance, the Liberals gained 100 of Ontario's 103 seats. This rich and long-settled province seems most sure of its place in the Canadian federation, and responded impressively for the governing party. Atlantic Canada, deeply dependent on government spending and inter-provincial transfers, gave 19 of 32 MPs to the Liberals, eight more than in 1997; Brian Tobin spoke for many when he described “a return to historic levels of support” after the bloodbath in the wake of Paul Martin's tight budgets. The region also sent nine of the Tories' twelve MPs, since the Scots and English of Atlantic Canada would rather support an old-style federal party than a showy populist movement from thousands of miles away. On a superficial reading, the big news might appear to be the vote in Quebec, where the Liberals tied the Bloc with 37 seats apiece. Yet, the real story is not an increase in federal support but a swing away from the Tories now that that they are led again by an Albertan (Joe Clark), not a Quebecker (Jean Charest). Although the NDP managed to win seats in six provinces, it achieved dominance nowhere and ended with a paltry 13 seats. Health care, on which leader Alexa McDonagh pinned her campaign, ranked only fourth on voters' issues of concern. Short of wholescale realignment, with the Liberals breaking apart and a left faction forming a new grand coalition, the party seems unlikely to taste power.

What's Changed?

Beyond these numbers, over which pundits and party hacks can pore for weeks, nothing has been settled in Canada. “The little guy from Shawinagin,” as Chretien styles himself, has won big. His government will continue to modernize the health care system and try to wean wheat farmers from price supports and encourage endogenous development in the East and cut taxes and do all the sorts of things that governments do in times of prosperity. It will even stand for responsible multilateralism, for the International Criminal Court and strong UN peacekeeping. But this program will not unite Canada. The two great threats have not disappeared. Rather, three provinces and a huge part of a fourth voted on November 27 against the basic principles of the Canadian state. The bilingual and multicultural state, seemingly a precondition of the political culture, gets support from only three of the major parties. Survey after survey shows Canadians identifying more by region or status than by nation. Even a decade ago, when the Quebec separatist movement was the only great battleground, the debate was different. Then, it seemed that somehow recognizing Quebec as a distinct society would convince enough Quebecois to hold back. The movement would remain, like those for Scottish or Catalan independence, focused on a long-term goal rather than an immediate action. Brian Mulroney's attempts at Meech Lake in 1988 to fashion such a constitutional settlement failed spectacularly. Now, the Alliance attacks seemingly without the deep-seated sense of historical injustice. Yes, both movements attack Ottawa, but can complaints about high transfer payments, excessive gas taxes, and distant bureaucrats ever equal the sense of injustice begun on the Plains of Abraham in 1763, when the British displaced the French as the colonial power in Quebec?

In some ways, the movements have powerful similarities; some have even foreseen a devolutionary Unholy Alliance between them. They are ideologically eclectic, populist, based in rural areas and small cities. They dislike the federal government, and doubt its moral authority. They hope for economic ties with the United States. They worry about secularism although Stockwell Day is a Baptist and the BQ supporters Roman Catholics. They dislike one another, with the West angry that rural Quebec (as well as Atlantic Canada) soaks up money, and that the French speakers demand unique status. Quebec's grudge has been nursed most powerfully by those best insulated from the rest of Canada the vast timber country stretching north and east of Montreal. Canada has left them in poverty and, for many years, denied them equal opportunities with Anglophones in education and commerce. Nationalism, say proponents, becomes the only response. These movements have fundamental differences, too. Independence entails far more headache and heartache than does devolution. One movement favors cutting the bonds among citizens, the other seeks to forge a deep set of bonds inside one group.

Many Canadian commentators have remarked that this election lacked a big theme. Certainly, no pressing issue like free trade with the US in 1988 dominated the headlines. But Canadians certainly had the power to choose not only the manifestation of their country but its basic roadmap. One hundred thirty-three years after it gained dominion status, Canada has not achieved consensus about its basic structure and values. With the exception of Ontario, leaders in every province speak as if they've been ripped off or deceived or tricked. The nation's betterment per se has not become a unit for which these Canadians sacrifice. By the same token, the great nationalist movements of the past century have taught us that teaching tolerance to the Quebecois easier said than done.

And yet, if so many Canadians vote against their country when times are good, surely things can only get worse. Chretien should spend more time and effort talking up national unity, certainly, but the real problem runs far deeper than the division of seats on Parliament Hill in Ottawa. The Liberals' technocracy can mute the discussion and dampen the hopes of Alberta and Quebec, but it can never vanquish the true believers in either camp. Some kind of galvanizing crisis might spawn extraordinary feelings of national camaraderie. More likely, however, the provinces will continue to bicker. The Bloc will replace its charmless leader, Giles Duceppe, with a strong federal counterpart to provincial Premier Lucien Bouchard. The Tories, who have no compelling program for the future, will suffer even more once Joe Clark finally leaves the scene. Many may well take South Park's advice and “Blame Canada.” And so the Chretien years may go down in history as a last golden age for a dying nation. If the Liberals can manage a majority thanks only to a divided right, can their worldview ever achieve hegemony? The institutional grievances behind the challenges to Canada will not disappear, and the federalists may not see such a favorable outlook again. Despite his policy feats, Paul Martin is no Jean Chretien as a political strategist, and the global combination of boom and center-left government remains extraordinary. Thus, the run-up to the campaign was looking back over the life of Trudeau, for the storm clouds form on the opposite horizon. Surely, when Canada's newspapers review the year's news stories they will put the death of Pierre Elliott Trudeau and the reelection of the Liberals as two of their top items. But they're really one. Trudeau, with his Scottish mother and his French father, fought for a united Canada with two languages and many cultures. Even after an election indicating that all's well up north, all three propositions remain in doubt. Trudeau's fought to make his country a “just society.” On the first score, Canada has succeeded impressively it ranks first in the UN's Human Development Index. Yet, the construction of Canadian society remains the nation's greatest challenge.

Questions? Comments? Please contact perspy@hcs.harvard.edu