The Changing of Canada’s Gods

from Dissent magazine:




The Changing of Canada’s Gods
Jordan Michael Smith - June 16, 2011


WHEN I cast my early ballot in Canada’s recent election, I was reasonably confident my vote for the Liberals would be put to good use. After all, even with the Liberals declining in the polls, trailing the incumbent Conservatives, the party hadn’t finished below second place since 1867, and it usually finished first.

Alas, that 145-year trend was broken on May 2, when the Liberals received just 19 percent of the vote. They placed behind not only the Conservatives but also the social democratic New Democratic Party, which will form the official opposition party for the first time. Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s Conservatives won a majority after ruling as a minority for five years. The shift was so dramatic that the national historian Peter C. Newman was forced to change the working title of the political book he is writing to When the Gods Changed: The Death of Liberal Canada. Basically, the Left was strengthened, the Right was strengthened even more, and the Center (Center Left from the American perspective) was decimated. How did that happen? Why did the gods change?

It is tempting to blame Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff, who retired the day after the bruising results. Some have succumbed to the temptation. “Maybe, just maybe, Michael Ignatieff is simply not everyone’s cup of tea,” lectured a columnist for the Globe and Mail. “Politics can be cruel that way.” But politics was equally cruel to the other two leaders the Liberals had in the last five years, Paul Martin and Stephan Dion. Martin, who came to power highly anticipated after serving as finance minister for the better part of a decade, drove the party to its first election loss to the Conservatives in twelve years. Martin’s successor, Dion, similarly failed to gain traction with voters. Maybe, just maybe, the Liberal problem was much larger than the leadership failings of Michael Ignatieff, very real as those were.

In fact, the roots of the party’s problems can be found in what might be called the Liberal Paradox: the success of programs initiated and implemented by the Liberals has been the very factor responsible for their downfall. As the Liberals have found out the hard way, what is good for the country is not necessarily good for the party. .............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://dissentmagazine.org/online.php?id=501