Canadian Election Aftermath: New Actors, Same Play?

The Canadian Federal election of January 23, 2006 to form the 39th Parliament had all these liberal democratic markings. In a suspenseful evening vote on November 28, the minority Liberal government of Paul Martin fell. Then, in a dramatic turn in the course of the campaign, the Conservative Party under the leadership of Alberta-based Stephen Harper suddenly surged into a lead in the polls of some 10 percent, after consistently lagging behind the Liberals for several years. Aided by continual Liberal corruption scandals, the political incoherence of the Martin campaign, and the populist message of ending the arrogance and insider dealings of Ottawa under the Liberals, the Conservative campaign gained traction. Most surprisingly, nationalist Quebec voters began shifting preference to the Conservatives, though they held no seats in the province and could hardly claim a political organization. With the New Democratic Party (NDP) and the Bloc Quebecois (BQ) vote largely moving sideways, this was enough to return a Conservative minority of 124 seats and a 36 percent vote share, with the Liberals holding 103 seats and 30 percent vote, and the rest of the 308 seats split among the BQ, the NDP and an independent. In a truly exceptional display of Canadian ambiguity, a change of government to punish the Liberals was delivered without a decisive verdict for a new political direction. Alternating the Conservatives for the Liberals returned the unstable division of the prior Parliament. The Conservatives cannot fashion a stable majority with either the Liberals or the NDP: the Liberals remain the alternate governing party and a critical vehicle for accessing power for a range of professional elites, and the NDP would be signing its own death warrant by undercutting any reason to support them as an opposition to the Right. And the BQ as a sovereignist party has no interest in governing federally. Indeed, the Conservatives and the BQ will reach a compromise only over specific pieces of legislation where there is agreement on what they don't want the Federal government doing. In essence, different reasons to support, on the one side, decentralist measures, and, on the other, stronger economic ties with the US: for the Conservatives, on the basis of the free market faith, and for the BQ, in the desire to build greater political independence for Quebec. http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/albo040306.html [Proofreader's note: this article was edited for spelling and typos on March 6, 2006]

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