TORONTO–With America’s attention focused on important matters in the Middle East and elsewhere at the moment, NRO readers can be forgiven for likely not noticing an important event that happened yesterday for conservatives in Canada.
For the first time in years, conservatives here have something to get excited about–and it may have positive implications for Canada-U.S. relations: The right is set to unite. (See NRO’s David Frum assess the move here.)
A quick primer: For about a decade, political conservatives here have been divided into two parties at the national level, the Progressive Conservatives (PCs) and the Canadian Alliance (formerly known as the Reform party.) Support for the PCs has been concentrated mainly in the eastern provinces, while the Alliance’s base is in the west. With conservative votes divided between the two separate entities, neither party has garnered the strength to pose a serious threat to the government. The result has been a free ride for the Liberal party under Jean Chrétien, who has won three consecutive elections since 1993, essentially by default.
But that is about to change. Yesterday, the leaders of the two conservative parties announced that after months of talks, an agreement-in-principle has been reached to combine forces and create a new entity to be known simply as the Conservative Party of Canada. The members of both parties must first approve the merger proposal by vote. Assuming they do, policies will be created at a convention next year and a new leader should be elected just in time for the next election, expected in the spring of 2004.
This merger has been a long time coming. The state of Canadian conservatism, at least at the national level, has been depressing for some time now. (Nearly half of the provincial governments, on the other hand, are in the hands of provincial PC parties.) The trouble started in the late 1980s, when conservatives, particularly those in Western Canada, became disenchanted with the PC government of Brian Mulroney, which they perceived not conservative enough and unfriendly to the west.
A populist, more socially conservative protest movement called Reform was born in 1987. The Reform party started bleeding support from the PCs and in the 1993 election, it won 52 seats in parliament (the third highest number, after the the Bloc Quebecois, a party advocating Quebec separation). Reform and its successor formed the Official Opposition, winning the second-highest seat total, in the the two elections since, slightly increasing their seat totals each time, but never coming close to forming government.
Various attempts to unite the two conservative parties in the past have failed. Reform launched an initiative called the “united alternative” in 1998, in an effort to bring the two parties together. The leadership of the PCs wouldn’t play ball, and Reform morphed into a new entity called the Canadian Alliance without them.
The conservative split in has been demonstrably bad for Canada. Not only has the splitting of conservative votes prevented either party from winning government, it has allowed the ruling Liberal party to implement their policies with dangerously little opposition.
Canada’s taxes remain high and uncompetitive, we maintain a Soviet-style healthcare system where buying private services is all but illegal; our military is literally falling apart and our standard of living as compared to America’s continues to decline. Canada’s presence on the international stage has been shrinking to the point where we are no longer taken seriously.
And worst of all, our relations with the United States have worsened considerably over the past few years. This is due in part to policy differences between the Liberal government and the Bush administration on a host of issues, particularly the war on terrorism, of which Canada has been a less-than-enthusiastic supporter.
For example, instead of joining its fellow members of the British Commonwealth, Great Britain and Australia, in marching lock step with President Bush in the effort to free Iraq, Canada sat out, effectively isolating itself from its principal allies in the Anglosphere.
There have also been a number of humiliating, reputation-tarnishing incidents. Two that come to mind are when an aide to Mr. Chrétien was overheard calling President Bush a “moron” at last year’s NATO summit in Prague, and when a Liberal member of parliament said, “Damn Americans…I hate those bastards” in front of TV cameras.
These and other such international embarrassments and the general deterioration of Canada-U.S. relations have angered many Canadians, especially conservatives. Our countries share so many common values and our economies are inextricably intertwined, including a trade relationship that sees the cross-border movement of $1 billion in goods every day. (A late Canadian politician even once said that “the Americans are our best friends whether we like it or not.”)
All of this has happened under the Liberal government’s watch over the last ten years. But because the opposition was so hopelessly divided, they were never able to hammer the government and get any traction. In fact, the two conservative parties spent a lot of their time simply attacking each other. Many Canadians, fed up with what they perceived as an exercise in futility, simply sat out and didn’t vote in some or all of the last three elections because they knew neither party had a chance at winning so long as they were divided.
But now the Canadian right is finally getting its act together. The reestablishment of a competitive, two-party system is likely to reinvigorate interest in the political process here and restore a functioning democracy to parliament–both positive and long-overdue developments. And that is good news not only for conservatives here but for the U.S. as well.
–Adam Daifallah, formerly a Washington correspondent of the New York Sun, is a member of the editorial board at Canada’s National Post.