It costs about a quarter-million dollars to raise a child in Canada and likely more if they play hockey or plan to go to college, says the Department of Finance. In a confidential cabinet memo, the department says it’s grappled with the “affordability of children”.
If Liberals stumble October 19 it would be the party’s longest losing streak since the death of John A. Macdonald. The fact underscores impressive success and unalterable failure. No party replaces the Liberal machine, with apologies to the Globe & Mail and certain pollsters. It’s a stretch to claim a new era of Conservative dominance when Conservatives lose Alberta and have difficulty scraping up 38% of the national vote.
It speaks instead to the impact of tinkering with political machinery, and changes in the country itself. Big Tent Politics is a subtle and revealing analysis of what went right, and wrong.
Political scientist R. Kenneth Carty, professor emeritus at the University of British Columbia, first dispels the mythology of Liberal dominance. Lots of democracies have long-winning parties, he notes: the Congress Party of India; Social Democrats of Sweden; Christian Democrats of Italy and Germany; and Ireland’s Fianna Fáil, which dominated Dublin politics from 1932 to 2011. All were winners that practiced “brokerage politics”, Carty explains.
“Rather than articulating different ideas and representing specific interests so that citizens can make electoral choices among them, a brokerage party actively aims to obscure differences and to muffle conflicting claims, generally in the name of social accommodation and always in the interest of its own internal unity,” Carty writes. “Brokerage parties are therefore a kind of unnatural anti-party, seeking to deny, or at least to suppress, the reality of competition among the community’s distinctive political parts. As one might expect, a brokerage party instinctively eschews ideological agendas and programmatic politics in the pursuit of large, volatile and heterogeneous support bases.”
In other words, build a big tent with room enough for everyone to get out of the rain. If Liberals have not won 50 percent of the popular vote since 1953, they won enough votes in enough provinces to score win after win.
So, what went wrong? Big Tent conducts the post-mortem with a scalpel. Brokerage parties by definition are “unprincipled and opaque”, Carty writes. It is their virtue and vulnerability: “Able to incorporate and to represent all also meant that the party was inherently shapeless”; “The lack of any single definition of what the Liberal Party represented was reflected in the real ambiguity regarding who constituted it.”
Big Tent examines the disastrous fiddling by Liberal HQ that weakened the machinery. The fact it took so long for Liberals to sputter is a credit to how skillfully the machine was forged in the first place: the Party, like Eaton’s, was so well-built it took hapless managers years to drive it into the ground.
The Liberal caucus lost direct control of the Party’s leadership; then managers failed to absorb new parties, with the result of splitting the ballot. Then riding associations were weakened to the point they no longer select candidates.
In 2008 then-leader Stephane Dion personally blocked the nomination of David Orchard in a Saskatchewan byelection, Desnethé-Missinippi-Churchill River. Orchard was a genuine and popular figure who’d endorsed Dion and signed up hundreds of new members. Dion Plays To Win, read the headline in the National Post. Well, not exactly: Liberals lost the byelection by 1,700 votes.
“Changes to the election law in the 1970s gave the leader the power to veto locally chosen candidates; then in the 1990s, the party altered its constitution to allow the leader to actively intervene to designate a specific local candidate,” writes Carty. “Both threatened the party’s long-standing internal dynamics.” Local organizers were alienated, and one-issue lobbyists were motivated to push managers into planting candidates.
Oddly, all major parties have made the same mistakes, ensuring Canada no longer sees any Big Tent politics. The ballot is fractured; voters are cynical and indifferent; parties bicker pointlessly over contrived and divisive issues like whether Muslim women should wear niqabs; and organizers are reduced to Twitter blitzes to reach electors who left the tent some time ago.
By Holly Doan
Big Tent Politics by R. Kenneth Carty; University of British Columbia Press; 176 pages; ISBN 9780-7748-29991; $29.95
A “significant increase” in whistleblower reports from oil insiders is prompting the National Energy Board to hire consultants for advice on how to process complaints. The Board yesterday reported receiving 17 whistleblower complaints in the past two years. There were none in 2013: ‘These are reports from external parties’.
In a ruling affecting thousands of prison inmates, a federal judge has struck down a longstanding Correctional Service risk assessment test as biased and “unreliable”. Court heard that management knew for years their standard psychological tests were flawed: “It doesn’t mean inmates will be flooding the streets; it means they will be given a fair shake”.
Only 1 percent of Canadians rate foreign affairs a top government priority, according to in-house research by the Privy Council Office. Voters were three times more likely to name the trade deficit than terrorism as a “threat” to the economy. The data was released just before last evening’s French-language leaders’ election debate on foreign policy: “It was the lack of good jobs that made them worry”.
Canada’s telecom regulator has released a new code governing wholesale broadcasting that sets out rules between broadcasters and programmers. The code attracted an unusually large number of submissions ahead of the CRTC’s requirements for simplified pick-and-pay cable and satellite packages of $25 a month: “It is not clear”.
A surprise 2013 tax break on hockey gear came only five weeks after Bauer Hockey Corp. threatened to move its Canadian operations over high tariffs, say newly-released documents. The manufacturer in a secret letter told the Department of Finance that rising tariffs “will have a direct effect on Bauer’s Canadian operations.”
A federal board that regulates drug prices is unconstitutional and should be disbanded, says a manufacturer. Alexion Pharmaceuticals Inc. is challenging the legality of the Patented Medicine Prices Review Board in Federal Court: ‘They win this case, there won’t be a drug in Canada that is price-controlled’.
Most migrant workers facing expulsion under a four-year deadline on labour permits were able to stay in the country, says an industry group. Thousands of temporary foreign workers saw their permits expire April 1: ‘The deadline didn’t affect us as much as we thought’.
The Canadian Coast Guard must beef up its icebreaker fleet or risk transport disruptions that will hurt the economy, say shipowners. In an election appeal, the Canadian Shipowners Association noted inadequate icebreaking caused troubles in the past two winters: “It’s difficult work”.
The federal prison population is forecast to rise by 25 percent or more within six years, says the Correctional Service of Canada. Prison management has already been cited by auditors for grossly overestimating inmate projections: “I don’t know how we would see a 25% rise”.
A federal whistleblower law is being challenged in court over arbitrary limits on investigations. A Department of Natural Resources employee said his complaints of reprisals were dismissed for failing to meet a 60-day deadline: “It takes time to ruin a person”.
Canada’s first federal credit union is proceeding with a merger of 14 institutions in what is expected to fuel more amalgamations. Parliament introduced legislation five years ago allowing credit unions to apply for federal licensing: “A lot of credit unions are looking at what we’re doing”.
A pair of federal employees have been docked two years’ pay after taking a moonlight swim in a Parks Canada pool. In an unusually steamy ruling, a labour board said the couple that took a romantic swim off-limits showed lack of respect towards their employer’s core mandate: “They should suffer the consequences”.
Cabinet is drafting legislation to strip benefits from federally-regulated pension plans, according to a private letter by Finance Minister Joe Oliver. The finance department had appeared to drop the proposal in months prior to the election campaign: “The government is now developing the federal legislative framework”.
