Canada Calls an Election

 

Can he ride a white horse?

Canada is heading into an election. Polls show the Liberals are ahead, and on track to form a majority government. And this time it really matters. This could end Canada.

Trump has played his cards well; or he is lucky. Trump having put out the welcome mat, Alberta  is scuffing its boots on it. Danielle Smith has issued a series of demands of the federal government, to prevent “an unprecedented national unity crisis”: 

1. guaranteed access to east and West coasts for Alberta oil and gas.

2. dropping restrictions on new pipelines.

3. dropping restrictions on oil tankers off the West Coast.

4. dropping emissions caps on oil and gas.

5. scrapping clean energy legislation.

6. lifting restrictions on single-use plastics

7. no export tax on oil and gas

8. no federal industrial carbon tax

9. better management of national parks—i.e., judicious pruning out of deadwood.

Smith has also said Alberta must stop subsidizing large provinces through equalization payments. 

The Liberals cannot agree to this. They would have to renounce their platform, turn on their environmentalist base, and alienate their Quebec base. It is Quebec that is blocking any pipeline east, and Quebec is the “large province” that benefits most from the equalization payments.

And if a Liberal government ignores her demands? Smith warns of an “unprecedented national unity crisis.” Unprecedented? That means something more serious than the Quebec separatist movements of the recent past.

The path is established by precedent: Smith can call a referendum on separation, as Quebec has. At least one poll showed 41% support for independence as of 2020. With the open offer to join the US on the table, the bite of tariffs, the explicit rejection of demands by Ottawa, official endorsement from the premier, and a charm offensive from the US, one can easily imagine that figure going over 50%. Alberta unbound.

Whether or not Alberta then joins the US, there goes Canada. Cut in half. No access to BC from Saskatchewan and East, and vice versa. Huge loss of government revenue. And everyone east of Saskatchewan loses their equalization payments.

If they do go on to join the US, Trump gets the oil and gas, and a relatively conservative voting base, for his new state. He may not even care about the rest of Canada and their troublesome liberal voters.

Without the equalization payments, without Alberta’s tax revenues, and without access to the rest of Canada, other provinces are likely sooner or later to come begging. And the Americans can pick and choose which it is in their interest to admit, and which to leave out in the cold.

Could the Conservatives save Canada? They can at least better afford to alienate Quebec by forcing through a pipeline; they do not much rely on Quebec as a base of support. 

Might Quebec then separate? Perhaps. But this is less likely. A pipeline across their turf is not so serious an issue. Quebec does not have Alberta’s easy fallback of joining the US: it would probably mean losing their distinct language and culture over time. And they would surely be poorer after separation, while Alberta would be richer. 

Conservatives would not be alienating their base by dropping environmental restrictions. That are all for deregulation in general, and killing he industrial carbon tax is a core part of their platform. Alberta’s insistence and Trump’s threats could be a useful excuse for what they want to do anyway.

If Trump wants to take Canada’s resources, Carney is his horse.

Exit Wexit

Canadian election results by riding.

I think the current upwelling of talk of “Wexit” in Alberta and Saskatchewan is undignified and does nothing to impress Central Canada.

After all, in the normal course of things, there is likely to be a new election in two years, the Conservatives are likely to win, and at least some of the policies that are so damaging to the energy sector are likely to be reversed.

So it makes sense to break up the country, with all the emotional and economic dislocation that would cause, instead of just waiting for two years?

Some might argue that a change in government is not enough; that these problems are endemic. They keep returning. But the problems that cannot be reversed by a change in federal government largely won’t be reversed because they are beyond the control of the federal government—opposition to pipelines from Quebec, or the US, or BC, or aboriginal groups. Separating from Canada will only make these problems worse; the red tape grows exponentially, and Alberta’s electoral leverage is gone.

Time is on Alberta’s side: western Canada is growing in population faster than the east. Over time, Alberta’s, Saskatchewan’s, and oil-bearing BC’s financial and electoral voices will get louder. Why would you quit just before you get promoted to the executive suite?

So it really all looks, from this corner of Central Canada, like a tantrum. I say that as a sometime Alberta resident. For the record, I support pipelines in all directions.

Nations split because of major cultural differences; most Albertans are first or second generation migrants from further east. If the situation really were intolerable for them, they have the easy option of moving back.

Or nations split because of some grave moral principle, like slavery. Does waiting a few years for a new pipeline really fit the bill? Realistically, oil or gas not sold today is not lost; it remains in the ground to be sold tomorrow. Possibly at a higher price.

Forget “Wexit.” That is a quitter’s game. It’s time to storm the battlements instead.

Of Lust, Pride, and Other Deadly Sins

The subtle dignity of a Gay Pride parade.

A piece by Graham Thompson in the National Post and in the Edmonton Journal (and Calgary Herald) condemns some Wildrose Party members as “intolerant,” “homophobic,” and “bigoted”--Thompson’s words—for objecting to a party functionary marching in Edmonton’s “Gay Pride” parade. To be more precise, the Wildrose Legislative and Outreach Assistant, Cody Johnston, had sent out a post on Facebook asking party members to support him in a “Pride Run” for the “Institute for Sexual Minority Studies.”

Members objected that this gave the public impression that the Wildrose Party supports such things. I do not know if they used intemperate language. If so, no examples seem to have been publicly offered. The worst Johnston has offered to the public as examples are “What kind of crap is this that you’re mailing out in the name of the Wildrose party?” and “Do not give the viewers the impression that this is Wildrose approved.”

Party leader Brian Jean has since spoken out: “There is no place for hate and that kind of speech within our party. There just isn’t.”

Hate speech?

Problem. This demonstrates that the average person cannot tell the difference between tolerance and active support. If you are not prepared to openly support a position, you are now intolerant.

As the Catholic Register put it recently:

Most people today equate tolerance with approval. Therefore, when many demand or ask for “tolerance” what they really demand is approval.

Bad news for Canadian Christians still reticent about converting to Islam.

Amsterdam does itself proud.

Or anyone concerned about freedom of thought in Canada.

Both homosexual sex and pride, both promoted by such parades, are sins—not only to Christians, but to just about anybody, of any religion. So, leaving aside homosexuality, is lust. Some people currently may be of the opinion that there is nothing sinful about either lust, homosexual sex or pride, that traditional morality is in error here, but they have no business demanding that everyone else think the same. They are free to make those arguments, so long as they do so in their own name. And so long as they respect the absolute right of others to disagree.

This has nothing to do with whether homosexuals should be discriminated against by the state because of their preference for homosexual sex. A moral person would have no difficulty in accepting that this is a private matter, and the state has no business in the bedrooms of the nation. But that is not the issue here. The very point of the “pride” parade is to refuse to keep such things private, and to demand public endorsement.

For a party leader, public official, or party functionary to march in such a parade really ought to be offensive to most Canadians, including “homosexual” Canadians. If our instincts are now the opposite, so much the worse for our cities of the plain.

Alberta Swings Left

The Alberta election yesterday is an example of how strange the results can be in a “first past the post” (so-called) electoral system like our own. To be sure, there was a major swing from right to left in the popular vote. The combined left-of- centre vote went from 19.74% in 2012 to 44.76% of votes cast in 2015. That's significant. Nevertheless, the NDP win hinged too on a collapse of the Liberal Party and a surge by the Wildrose. The left of centre vote was united behind one party, and the right of centre vote was evenly split in two, so that the NDP was able to come up the middle. Based on raw votes, which is to say, the actual popular will, the government of Alberta would still be to the right of centre: you will note that 44.76 is still less than 50%. The Wildrose plus the PCs took 52.01% of all votes, and the tiny Alberta Party another 2.28%. Instead, the election has produced an absolute majority for a party that is not even centre-left, but left-left, on the Alberta political spectrum: not the moderate Liberals, but the out-there NDP.

Change in government is good, and Alberta was overdue. But lurches like e this are probably not. They make it hard for businesses and individuals to plan for the future.

This seems to me to illustrate the argument for my own proposal for the Canadian senate. One could do something similar, after all, on the provincial level. Leave the lower house elected as now, by riding; and add an upper house elected province-wide, or nation-wide, by proportion of the popular vote, without ridings.

Why? In the first case, because it would more accurately reflect the popular will, ensuring that all voices are heard. In the present case, assuming, for simplicity, a 100-member upper house, the result would be 41 NDP members in the upper house, 28 PCs, 24 Widrose, 4 Liberals, and 2 Alberta Party, with one Green. In other words, while the NDP would be the largest bloc, it would be a minority government there. The right wing would have a majority in the upper house.

This would also work towards stability, reducing sudden lurches in government policy.

A problem with bicameral legislatures generally is that they can cause deadlock. This is also a problem with proportional representation, as it makes it much more difficult for any one party to get a majority. My proposal would avoid this: only the lower house would have the power to initiate bills. The upper house, on the other hand, would have solely the power to rescind bills previously passed, which had been in effect for a set time period. Even if this time period were just a year, this would allow the lower house to budget on its own.

This would prevent any direct clashes between the two houses, and allow a majority government in the lower house to get on with the practical business of government. There would be no fiscal crises like the recent budget battles in the US. But there would still be a check on government actions.

The idea of ridings is, on the whole a good one. It is a way to protect geographically-based minorities from being run over roughshod by majorities. On the other hand, it does this by short-changing any minorities that are not geographically based. The upper house could handle that: you will note that it gives increased representation to minority parties like the Alberta Party and the Greens. In Canada, our problem tends to be regionalism; we could use such a unified chamber as a corrective. A regional grouping like the Bloc Quebecois would have much smaller representation in this upper than the current lower house. Giving more voice to minority parties, in turn, would encourage their formation, allowing more voices to be heard in parliament and in our public affairs, without the political splintering and ever-changing coalitions one sees in nations like Israel or Italy. There would be a point in voting NDP even if you knew they could never win your local riding.

This form of upper house would also give parties the opportunity to protect star candidates whose talents they consider vital to their success, or their success in government. Such protection would in turn lure more people of high calibre into public life.

Not incidentally, the structure I propose would naturally lead to legislation being regularly rescinded. This corrects a problem with the current system: now, all the incentive is to add new legislation, never to repeal old legislation. As a result, government naturally grows larger and larger, which is not the best thing to have happen. Better to have a balance here.

In the meantime, Albertans, get ready for a rocky ride. Ontarians went through something like this a generation ago, when their longstanding PC government was supplanted first by the Liberals, and then the NDP. It was a less dramatic swing than this one, and I think most Ontarians would now agree that it did not turn out terribly well.