giles duceppe

No, not that one, down in the U.S. of A. The one up here! Wait, you say, you didn’t know there was one happening in Canada? That’s the beauty of parliamentary politics—the Prime Minister can ask the Queen Governor-General to dissolve Parliament and call a snap election pretty much whenever he likes. Okay, it’s a bit more complicated than that, but that’s the basic idea. So on 14 October there will be a federal election in Canada.

I haven’t written about this yet because, frankly, I’m sick of all the election talk, both about the American and Canadian elections, and in both the blogosphere and the “traditional media” (whatever that means these days). Fortunately, I don’t have to write about it, because Ian Welsh at Firedoglake has already done it. His post has everything you need to know about the upcoming Canadian federal election. Seriously, everything’s in there. Go ahead, read it.

Back? Good. I will simply add my two cents to a couple of Ian’s points. But first a little background. Part of the problem with parliamentary politics is that you need a majority to get anything done, and with five major federal parties nobody has been able to form a majority in the last couple of Parliaments. Add to that the fact that there are essentially four left-wing parties and one right-wing party (we can argue about that later, if you like), and you can see why there might be splits between various left-wing voters more than various right-wing voters, leading to pluralities for the right-wing party. The current Conservative Party was formed by a series of mergers of various right-wing parties and coalitions, and its current head Stephen Harper was one of the founding members of the Reform Party—an alliance of racists, sexists, homophobes, xenophobes, neocons, and general all-around bigots.

The Reform Party, though now defunct, lives on in the Conservative Party and its leader Stephen Harper. Don’t be fooled by people who say that in American politics the Conservatives would be regarded as liberal. Some Conservatives might be, as would some of the former constituent groups that merged. But as Ian Welsh noted, Harper is nothing more than “a neocon in Canadian drag”. His is a nonstop agenda of hawkish foreign policy, running up huge deficits by cutting taxes for the mega-rich, and trying to introduce constitutional reforms like an elected Senate which, as Welsh correctly notes, would only serve to “introduce US style gridlock and corruption”—more places for big business to throw its money into politics.

Stephen Harper doesn’t care about true social justice or effective remedies to some of this country’s problems, and he certainly doesn’t care one whit about ordinary people. He’s only interested in placating his friends in business—especially the oil industry—by lining their pockets with enormous tax cuts, letting them further destroy the natural environment, and creating more politicians whom they can then buy. Sound like anybody you might know in international politics?

Of course, the Liberal Party are handicapped by their own unpopular leadership in the person of Stéphane Dion, nobody takes the federal NDP or the Green Party seriously (though this might change if they can win a couple more seats in this election), and the Bloc Québécois doesn’t run candidates outside of Québec so they can’t win even a minority government. The leader of the Bloc, Giles Duceppe, was unfortunately correct when he said yesterday that his party was the only thing standing between Harper and a majority government. The situation doesn’t look good—Stephen Harper will probably be the next prime minister of Canada. The only question is whether he will lead a minority government and thus have continuing gridlock, or whether he will lead a majority government and thus plow his right-wing neocon agenda full steam through Canada.