Calling all Progressive Activists!!
Canada Needs YOU!!
Canada is unbelievably on the road to electing a Conservative pro-Bush, anti-Kyoto, pro-Iraq War government.
As a Canadian Progressive I'm calling on all our Daily Kos friends to help in any way they can by emailing or phoning any Canadian friends and relatives they may have and begging with them to reject this option.
It's bad for Canada, and bad for the World (As the world's 2nd largest country, we do have a proportionate effect on the global environment). We're your neighbour and largest trading partner, what happens to you affects us and vice versa (though less so--kinda like an elephant sleeping next to a mouse situation)
I'm hoping that my fellow Canadians will vote tomorrow for the NDP candidate in their riding where the NDP has a chance of winning. Where the NDP does not have a chance at winning, people should hold their nose and vote Liberal to head off a Conservative majority Government
More in the Extended Body
After the last presidential election in the States many American friends contacted me about half-seriously emigrating to a more Progressive Canada. I laughed at the time, and told many of them to just wait, things aren't as progressive in Canada as they may seem. Sure we can have abortions, dudes can marry other dudes, and we can smoke dope -- but that is only part of the picture.
In reality we've had a "Liberal" government in power for the last 12 years that is liberal in name only. They campaign like liberal-progressives in elections and then govern like republicans when in power. Only when they are held to account in a minority government situation are they subject to keeping their more progressive promises.
For the last 12 years we haven't had to worry about Conservative governments after the disastrous Conservative government under Brian Mulroney was reduced from a 175 seat majority to just 2 lonely seats. The Right crumbled into separate social and economic conservative factions and were too busy fighting each other to fight for actual power. The governing Liberals started to govern like small-"c" conservatives in order to press their electoral advantage. They cut and slashed essential social and welfare programs in order to obsess single-mindedly over reducing debt and deficit. The party that once stood for Pierre Trudeau's "just society" now presided over the greatest unbalancing of social justice in our history. The poor have gotten poorer and the rich, richer. Big corporations have record profits and Canada economic performance is the best of the G-8 nations. (this means little to actual people though since most of the gains are in the resource sector such as Oil and Gas and the profits all head south to the USA in the end)
Anyway, the Liberals have suddenly gone from a sure bet to a lost cause in just the 2 months of this current campaign. Why? A number of reasons.
Firstly, the Liberals have been rocked by corruption scandals, investigations and infighting for the past few years since Paul Martin took over as Liberal leader and Prime Minister. Similar to the Tony Blair/Gordon Brown situation in Britain, Paul Martin was Jean Chretien's number two man and finance minister for a decade, but schemed for the top job the whole time. While Chretien was a pragmatist and a centrist interested mostly in just consolidating power, Martin was a Millionaire businessman (Shipping) and
definitely to the right of centre. It was Martin who was primarily responsible for slashing social and health programs in order to eliminate the deficit. The scandals are not unlike the Abramoff situation in that they involved kickbacks from Advertising companies hired by supposedly non-partisan civil servants to run a clandestine operation to increase federal visibility in Quebec to combat the separatist movement. The scandal involves members of Cabinet, Liberal Party organizers, top civil servants, envelopes of cash in Italiam Restaurants, etc.. you get the idea) Instead of shrugging this scandal off as Chretien would have done (probably succesfully), Martin decided that this was an excellent chance for him to purge the party of Chretienites by calling an official government inquiry into the matter. Whatever his good intentions at stamping out corruption may have been the results have been uniformly disastrous for the Liberal brand. The entire party has been tarnished with the "Corrupt" label and they reawakened separatism in Quebec, where the inquiry became as popular as a daily soap opera. The party that billed itself as the only able defender of the Canadian federation is polling in single digits in Quebec and is unlikely to win any seats outside of English Montreal. The sad truth is, American and British readers beware, that for a guy who campaigned to become Prime minister for more than a decade, Martin was shockingly void of ideas once he actually attained the position. He and his team of advisors were adept at attaining power but woefully pitiful and wielding it. By trying to be all things to everyone he ended up just being a friend to nobody. (Gordon Brown, and Democratic Presidential Candidates, BEWARE!)
Secondly the Conservatives have wisely adopted a more moderate campaign. Though really this is just a clever manipulation. They have told all there most right wing nutty (and beleive me, they've got some doozies that would make Ralph Reed and Pat Robertson wince) candidates to shut their traps and to not say anything contraversial lest they mar the faux-moderacy of the new Conservative message. Candidates are hustled away before the press has a chance to ask them questions. It is a wonderful take on Bush's "compassionate conservatism" load of B.S. For the most part people aren't fooled by the Conservatives sudden conversion, however the appetite for change is great. The conservatives are the only party that can reasonably expect to gain enough support to form a government and so people are flocking to them. But basically it is a movement from the "Corruption-riddled Liberals" to the "Corruption-seeking Conservatives"
3. Finally, an inability to appeal to actual progressive voters. The Liberals have tried to replace the support that they have lost to the right by going after more votes on the left. However, after 12 years of centre-right government they just don't have any credibility as a party on progressive issues. Gay-marriage only came about because it was forced on the government by the Supreme Court. And even then 47 socially conservative Liberal MPs voted against it and it passed only with the help of the progressive NDP party and the Separatist Bloc Quebecois. There are many progressive MPs in the Liberal caucus, but tragically they've been silent for most of the past 12 years while Paul Martin and his rightist supporters have been the dominant party. As a result the left-leaning NDP has doubled its support since the 2000 elections. However, because the NDP is mainly an English Canadian phenomena, most progressive voters in Quebec have no other option than to vote for the Separatist Bloc. The NDP is only really strong in Urban areas in English Canada with a few pockets of strength in traditional left-leaning rural ridings like in Saskatchewan (home of universal health care, my home province). In other regions of Canada Liberals and NDP often end up splitting the progressive vote allowing Conservative victories that the majority of citizens don't want.
The Conservatives are currently polling at just under 40%. This reflects a real collapse of the Liberal vote both in Quebec and in English Canada that could see them putting a majority government together. People are tired of Liberal arrogance and corruption and are looking for change. A conservative government, however, would be absolutely disastrous. The world's second largest country can not afford to pull out of Kyoto. We are losing Hundreds of acres of land to the Arctic Ocean every day due to melting of the permafrost, one of the effects of Global Warming. We cannot afford to have our beloved public universal health care system gutted to pave the way for a private or two-tier American style system that cost more and doesn't treat everyone equally. We can not afford to have the few socially progressive triumphs of the past decade reversed by a reactionary, socially-conservative rump. While in the US, Bush has rung up the worst deficits in history due to his disastrous foreign policy and tax decisions, in Canada we are running record surpluses due to over-obsession with paying down debt. We can not afford to let these billions in surplus that could be use to repair the damage of a decade of cuts, to be frittered away though Conservative tax cuts to the rich and other vote-buying schemes.
That's what is at stake.
There is an option for people who are mad at the Liberals but scared of the Conservatives - that is the progressive NDP. They don't have a chance to win in many ridings and especially not in rural areas, but they stand to take a number of seats away from both the Conservatives and Liberals. At this late point in the campaign, a Conservative victory is unstopable. The only question is will it be a majority or minority government? For progressives, the best situtation will probably be a parliament where a Conservative minority government must rely on the NDP for support and to keep it's socially conservative policies in check. The slightly progressive Bloc Quebecois is the Third Rail of Canadian politics and no party can be seen to cooperate with them since they advocate the break-up of Canada. The Liberals, almost everyone agrees, need to lose this election badly so that they can dump the ineffectual Paul Martin and figure out exactly what they believe in, if anything.
So I'm asking all Daily Kossacks to get on the horn to their Canadian friends and plead with them to vote NDP in their ridings if the NDP candidate has a remote chance of winning the seat. Only a strong contingent of NDP MPs who know what they believe in and will fight for it will be able to keep the Conservatives on the moderate path and make sure that we don't end up as a talking-puppet for the Bush administration.
Everything that is good and decent in Canada, everything that makes us a model for the the world has come from the Progressive side of the political equation. This is as true in Canada as it is in the US. Our Multiculturalism, our Health Care system, Our commitment to Peace, Democracy, Human Rights and International Engagement, these are all progressive Canadian accomplishments. Sure we've got a way to go: Our environmental record is the pits, our treatment of our aboriginal population is an embarassment, and the country that invented UN Peacekeeping and had the fourth largest army after WWII has let it's military disastrously flounder to the point of irrelevance. I see little hope for Canada to once again become a force for positive change in the world under a Conservative government and I hope that Canadians will ultimately reject this possibility.
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Here are some resources for the Curious Kossack:
The Globe and Mail (Hilariously referred to as "far-left" by that paragon of truth, Bill O'Lielly) is a conservative leaning paper but nonetheless the paper of record up here. They have and excellent election section on their website if you are interestested in knowing more about the background of this election campaign and the parties involved.
http://www.globeandmail.com
Also Bourque Newswatch. Kind of like Canada's Drudge but with great links to newspapers, blogs and columnists from the Great White North
http://www.bourque.com
Canadian TV networks incase you want to catch some of the results on Monday night
http://www.cbc.ca (Public broadcaster, centre-leftish)
http://www.ctv.ca (Private broadcaster, more conservative)
You can find a fascinating and exhausting riding-by-riding breakdown and a strategic voting guide at this excellent site:
http://www.democraticspace.com
Last but not least, the parties websites themselves:
Liberal Party of Canada (Party currently in power)
http://www.liberal.ca
Conservative Party of Canada (Bush-Lite)
http://www.conservative.ca
New Democratic Party of Canada (Daily Kos's dream progressive Party)
http://www.ndp.ca
and lastly the Bloc Quebecois (Quebec Separatists)
http://www.bloc.org
There is also the Green Party that is polling a respectable 5% or so but due to our outdated First-past-the-post system they are unlikely to win any individual seats in parliament.