October 19 was fixed as the date for Canada’s election under legislation passed in 2007. The principal players have been known for years. Stephen Harper became prime minister in February 2006. Tom Mulcair became leader of the leftist New Democratic party in March 2012. Justin Trudeau, son of Pierre, the Liberal prime minister from 1968 to 1984 (with a short break in 1979–80) became leader of the Liberal party in April 2013.
In 2011, Stephen Harper’s Conservatives for the first time won a majority; the Liberals, who had governed Canada for two-thirds of the past century, came in a distant third under visiting professor Michael Ignatieff; and the New Democrats, always the third party, became the official opposition, with more than half their seats in Quebec, where they had previously held only one, Mulcair’s.
NDP’s 2011 surge, a triumph for its leader, the genial Jack Layton, who, unbeknownst to the voters, was mortally ill and died three months after the election, raised hopes on the left that the party might finally form a government in Ottawa. It has formed governments in six of Canada’s ten provinces, some pragmatic and creditable, some best forgotten. The powers of provincial governments preclude the socialism that was the party’s founding faith.
With Mulcair as NDP’s leader, it has dropped its official commitment to socialism. It has tried to be Canada’s equivalent of New Labour in Britain, just as New Labour was dying in Britain.
The NDP’s path to power seemed briefly to be blocked by the accession of Justin Trudeau to the Liberal leadership. Handsome, pleasant, and a celebrity of whom all Canadians had heard since his birth on Christmas Day 1971, young Trudeau promised to be the New Trudeau that Michael Ignatieff had failed to be. He appealed to the old, nostalgic for the Trudeau years, and to youth. His first commitment was to legalize marijuana.
But young Trudeau was vulnerable. No one had expected a Trudeau dynasty. Perhaps not even Justin. He had shown only a perfunctory interest in politics until he was elected to Parliament in 2008. He had only vague ideas, and soon after he became leader expressed his admiration for the ability of China’s dictators to “turn their economy around on a dime.”
The Conservatives subjected him to relentless attack ads on the slogan “not ready.”
As Trudeau and the Liberals faded, the NDP under Mulcair went into the campaign on a roll, leading in the polls for some time, though the consensus was that it was an unpredictable three-way race.
About a month ago the NDP dropped to third place. The conventional explanation is that Mulcair’s position that women should be allowed to wear a niqab on being sworn in as citizens precipitated a drop in NDP support in Quebec, and that led to a drop-off elsewhere. Charles Taylor, the distinguished philosopher and one-time vice president of the NDP, was hired by the Quebec government to advise on religious and multicultural accommodation. Despite his earnest advice, Québécois share with their French cousins a meager tolerance for public religious display. Their voting record is also spectacularly volatile, as they have swept in and out Liberals, Conservatives, and the separatist Bloc Québécois and New Democrats. It doesn’t take much to move them.
There has been much hand-wringing over the possibility that the election may turn on how two or three women — so far, it is only that many — may dress when sworn in as citizens. The revelation in polls that as many as 75 percent of Canadians take the incorrect view dismays those who want to condemn the opponents of the niqab as bigots.
Either the Liberals are on a roll that won’t show until the votes are counted or they have peaked and, as often happens, the Conservative vote has been underestimated.
But it may be that Mulcair’s beard is as important. Most voters had only seen him in passing on the news until TV ads started running. He comes across as aggressive and smug.
More important, Mulcair’s attempt to present the once clearly social-democrat NDP as simply a capable alternative is failing. The party’s supporters, and most of its candidates, are muddle-headed lefties, somewhere between Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders. Mulcair was a Liberal cabinet minister in Quebec. In 2007 he was thinking of working with the Conservatives. A video has surfaced showing him singing the praises of Margaret Thatcher. Voters are left to think he is either a cynic prepared to take any course to power or a front man for the same old Left they have always rejected.
For many voters the goal is to get rid of Harper. He has never been exciting except to opponents who have variously claimed he wanted a dystopia rather like Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, had a hidden neocon agenda, or was simply dictatorial because he has played political hardball, as he learned it from the Liberals in their heyday. He has governed from the center, disappointing some conservatives. After ten years in office he has accumulated a long record of missteps and petty scandals.
In August the news was dominated by the endless trial of a TV journalist appointed by Harper to the Senate and charged with 31 counts of dodgy expense claims. To the media the gravest was that Harper’s chief of staff at the time made good the expenses from his own deep pockets.
With only a short time to go before the votes are counted, either the Conservatives or the Liberals are in the lead. Neither seems likely to win a majority, but either the Liberals are on a roll that won’t show until the votes are counted or they have peaked and, as often happens, the Conservative vote has been underestimated. The most likely result is a weak Conservative government or a Liberal near-majority and a Trudeau government.
Either way, there is likely to be another election before the next legislated date, as the legislation allows and experience shows. Fixed election dates are not possible with parliamentary government.
Harper has been a vociferous supporter of Israel, which may be comforting to Benjamin Netanyahu but matters little to the outcome of the election. He has been assiduous in the pursuit of free trade, signing on to the TPP during the election and wrong-footing Mulcair, who has felt obliged to go for knee-jerk protectionism just when he should have shown his free-market credentials.
Some have accused Harper of mishandling the Keystone pipeline issue, claiming that had he become Obama’s great friend it would be a done deal by now. But Obama doesn’t seem to make friends abroad, and the pipeline’s fate hangs on U.S. domestic politics beyond Canada’s influence.
A Trudeau government would hand Canada’s international relations back to the foreign service, a Liberal establishment, and be all peacekeeping, honest brokerage, and meetings. In a leaked government paper, the Department of Foreign Affairs claimed that Canada’s “stature” has declined under Harper. Pierre Trudeau’s foreign policy was frivolous, but Canadians enjoyed his celebrity and may hope for more of it under his son.