 Ideology returned in force to Canadian electoral politics June 28, after a fifteen year, three-election cycle absence.
The dramatic 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall, and the subsequent 1990 collapse of the Soviet Union, famously left the left in all Western nations, including Canada, with no anchoring ideological pivot. But these events transformed the entire spectrum of electoral politics throughout the West, and not just on the left side, and not just in Canada. The collapse of what had been labeled the only viable alternative to the laissez faire capitalist model in 1990 left all political parties with no anchoring intellectual pivot.
Back then, as Francis Fukuyama famously put it with the title of his book, we were at “The End of History”—by which he meant the end of ideology as the chief motivating factor in politics the world over. The US had defeated the USSR, the Cold War was over, and the great clash of ideologies it represented had been resolved in capitalism's favour. Not only was the left henceforth deprived of a credible ideology, but all parties through the center to the right were also deprived of an enemy ideology against which they could define themselves and take up intellectual battle.
Ideology was consequently suspended for nearly a generation in Canada, at least at the national level. In Britain, voters elected Tony Blair, a so-called “third way” labour leader, the third way being an explicit abandoning of the first way—which, for the left in Britain, was ideological battle stations, all hands. The US elected Bill Clinton on similar grounds, precisely because he lacked specific ideology. Ditto national elections in the 1990s in Germany and France.
Liberal Jean Chretien replaced the disgraced Tories in government in Canada in 1993 by also projecting a completely ideology-free stance toward governance, and with this method managed to put together three straight majority victories over the course of that decade.
The more ideologically-oriented NDP, Reform/Alliance, and Conservative parties at one point in the 1990s were each elected to fewer seats than a party running candidates in only that one quarter of seats that are found in Quebec (running on a Quebec separatist platform), leaving those anti-Canadians in the odd position of forming the Queen's so-called loyal opposition! That is how non-ideological that period was in Canada.
The newly merged right wing Conservative party failed to win government in the 2004 federal election, and the NDP only added to their seat count moderately, compared to pre-election predictions, suggesting perhaps that ideology remains out of fashion in Canada. However, while the Paul Martin Liberals won their fourth straight (albeit minority) government, early on in the campaign, it didn't look like they would. The trick was turned only when the Liberals finally engaged in ideological battle in the campaign's final week, turning a sure loss into a surprisingly comfortable win in a matter of days. That is how ideological this period has become.
Though always portrayed by soft-skinned, Victorian-mannered and easily offended journalists as “negative campaigning,” ideological battles by all five main parties dominated the thinking of the electorate and finally, with days to spare, gave them real ideas to choose from at the ballot box. It will take until the next election for party platform writers, and journalists, to catch up to where the people are already at.
It is probably—and certainly will be more so in the next election—that the NDP and Conservatives could have done better, not worse, had they emphasized instead of hidden their ideological foundations in this most recent election. It is as though the Conservatives are terminally out of phase with the Canadian electorate. In the 1990s, they remained rigidly and explicitly ideological in a decidedly non-ideological period for Canadians. Just when the right wing learned to tone down their ideological pronouncements, Canadians once again became receptive to play on this level.
The NDP have been caught in a different time warp. In non-ideological times, lefties become Liberals, while in ideologically-sensitive periods, Liberals become NDP supporters. Ironically, it means that the NDP membership skews toward the more soft-pedaling Liberal positions in ideological times, and—because the moderates leave the party in non-ideological times—skews more toward the hard-core socialist position in those non-ideological periods, since those are the ones who stay behind. So long as there is a Liberal party, there will never be an NDP government, as a result.
Interestingly, had Canada this time employed a pure proportional representation electoral system, and had the Communists and Marxist Leninists buried whatever hatchets they still have propped up at each other and merged, and fielded candidates in all 308 ridings, they very well might have won a single seat in the parliament. They did win more than 13,000 votes by running in only 103 ridings, for about one-third of one percent of the votes cast in those ridings. Projected out to all ridings, they would have qualified for about one seat.
And the Greens would have won 15 seats, and the NDP 45. This would have made for a five-fold increase in representation in parliament of parties of the left, and if that happened, there would be no shortage of articles in the papers today about how suddenly Canadians have turned left, and more surprisingly, and alarmingly for most journalists, ideological.
Canadians really did turn sharply more ideological, in keeping with a more radicalized Western world shocked and awed by American ideological projections, among other things, but journalists still insist on calling ideological pronouncements “negative campaigning.” And only a few journalists have looked beyond blindingly unrepresentative seat counts to notice in the popular vote a rising polarization along several new and old ideological fault lines in Canadian society. The near future promises much more interesting politics in Canada than has been the case for a generation.
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