Expat Canadian TPM Reader TSD checks in with some background on what happened last night up north …
Josh
I was wondering if/when you were you going to post about the election in Canada!
I’m an expat Canadian living in the NY area. This has been an incredibly fascinating election, not least because the leader of the Liberal Party is the son of the legendary PM of the 1970’s and 1980’s, Pierre Trudeau.
Trudeau is largely responsible for shaping the Canada that the rest of the world is familiar with; small ‘l’ liberal, progressive taxes, multicultural, non-interventionist, peacekeeping. He was friendly with Jimmy Carter and Fidel Castro (here’s a picture of Castro holding New PM Justin Trudeau’s brother, Michel as a baby) and by some accounts with John Lennon and Yoko Ono; he opened relations with China before Nixon made it cool. He is literally a modern founding father of Canada, in that he repatriated our constitution from the United Kingdom and pushed through the Charter of Rights and Freedoms (our bill of rights) in the early 1980’s.
But all of this liberal (again, small ‘l’) progress and a new national energy policy alienated conservatives in the West, particularly in Alberta, where folks weren’t interested in a national policy to control oil prices and resented the outsized role that Quebec and Ontario played in national affairs.
The entire persona of Stephen Harper and the Conservative Party you see today is very much a byproduct of all of this resentment, and an absolute hatred of Pierre Elliott Trudeau and the Liberals.
That the son of this PM so hated by western conservatives beat Harper so handily is beyond poetic.
(Alberta in particular is like the Texas of Canada and the Trudeau name is like the Kennedys on steroids.)
A second point on this outcome: you have to consider Canada’s proportional representation system. The Conservatives unified in the early 2000’s, and started to gain seats before two minority Harper governments and finally a majority in 2011. But they never cracked more than 40% nationally.
The progressive/liberal vote always outnumbered the Tory numbers.
But the further-left NDP and the Liberals, along with not-inconsequential Green Party split the anti-Conservative vote. What we’re seeing tonight is certainly a loss of support for the Conservatives, but more importantly it looks like NDP voters decided that Trudeau was their best bet to oust Harper. So you have some if the biggest upsets happening within NDP seats switching to the Liberals.
Really interesting stuff. It should make Canada very fun to watch for the next few years.
Did I mention that Trudeau is an inexperienced 43 year old, former schoolteacher who promised to raise taxes on the rich, run deficits to invest in infrastructure, legalize marijuana, and make meaningful progress on climate change?
