Post Mortem

Now that the dust has settled, it's time to take stock. As just about every commentator has noted, this election was, while not quite a debacle, nevertheless a sound defeat for the Liberals. And for that Stephane Dion will shoulder the blame. As Susan Riley wrote last week in The Ottawa Citizen, he deserved better. For, like it or not, the most effective way to slow global warming is to tax carbon. George Soros -- who has for some time been predicting the present financial calamity -- made that point two weeks ago to Bill Moyers. Furthermore, the way out of this mess is to tax consumption, not incomes. If the last two months illustrate anything it is that, when you make consumption effortless, you encourage unsustainable debt.

Unfortunately, Mr. Dion has difficulty connecting with ordinary citizens. They see him as a good and decent man who is too shrill and too schoolmarmish. And there is, also unfortunately, simple minded prejudice at work about a man who has trouble wrapping his tongue around the words of his second language. Those who fault him for that should go back and listen to John Diefenbaker's French. Dion's English may be awkward. Diefenbaker's French was excruciating. Be that as it may, the time when a Canadian prime minister needed to function well in only one language has long since passed. Anyone seeking to lead this country must be able to slip effortlessly between English and French.

The Conservatives made hay out of Dion's linguistic weakness. They certainly played and replayed the beginning of that CTV interview, where Dion had difficulty understanding a question. And their attack ads -- complete with pooping puffins -- were shameful. But this has been standard fare for some time now. Anyone who has watched Mr. Harper operate over the last two and a half years was not surprised by the Conservative campaign.

And, because we were not surprised, we have lived through a national Ground Hog Day, where we were before Mr. Harper broke his own law because (he said) the country needed an election. Canadians knew that while the Conservatives tried to make Dion look like an egghead and Harper look like (Bob Rae said) Perry Como, there really was a tyrant behind the facade.

Quebecers understood this better than anyone else. When Harper trashed arts galas and suggested a get tough approach to youth crime, they knew he really didn't understand them. Quebecois irascibility is a legitimate source of concern. Jeffrey Simpson noted in the Globe and Mail that "By voting Bloc for six consecutive elections the largest number of francophones in Quebec turned their backs on Canada, while not expecting that the rest of Canada would ever turn its back on Quebec."

The problem, of course, is that the "open federalism" Harper practices makes that possibility more likely. For while Mr. Harper has a clear idea of how he wishes Canada would work, he truly doesn't understand how either Quebec or Canada really works. His central governing philosophy is not John A. MacDonald's or Dalton Camp's conservatism. Under the tutelage of Tom Flanagan -- born in the United States, with a doctorate in political science from Duke University -- Harper has tried to import American neo-liberalism into the country. Both MacDonald and Camp understood that in the world's second largest country, with one of the world's thinnest but most diverse populations, both American Republicanism and pure British parliamentary government would not work. And in the United States, where the consequences of neo-liberalism are now on full display, one can argue that it has been a spectacular failure.

It was Harper's ignorance of how his own country functions that both Jack Layton, Elizabeth May and -- most importantly -- Gilles Duceppe impugned. And, when Mr. Harper suggested that ordinary Canadians should use the stock market meltdown as an opportunity to buy stocks, he displayed a truly indecent ignorance of how most of his fellow citizens live. Harper is a shrewd technocrat who knows a lot about a narrow slice of human experience. And it was what he didn't know that led Canadians to the conclusion -- for the second time -- that giving the man a majority was unwise.

So we're back where we started -- except Stephane Dion will be leaving the stage, perhaps as early as today. That means another leadership convention for the Liberals. Mr. Dion's leadership was the direct result of the uncivil war between Mr. Chretien and Mr. Martin. Whoever the party chooses, he or she must unite its left and right wings. There is no time and no room for an interim or a default leader.

The problems we face at home and abroad are extraordinary. Turnout for this election was 59% -- the lowest in Canadian history. Clearly, in a country where 75% of the citizens used to regularly go to the polls, none of the leaders on offer struck Canadians as extraordinary. One can only hope that, next time around, the leaders and the campaigns will be extraordinarily different.

The Cult of the Magician

Even before the Governor General dissolved Canada's 39th Parliament yesterday, the Conservatives were running campaign ads. On television we were treated to a warm and fuzzy Stephen Harper -- a family man -- who was trying to appeal to women voters, a demographic which -- to date -- he has not impressed. On radio, voters have been bombarded for sometime with ads trashing the Liberal Greenshift proposal -- and linking Stephane Dion's name to it at every replay. This ad is presumably aimed at the male population, who (supposedly) are hard headed and who hate taxes -- any taxes.

What both ads attempt to do is to frame the election in terms of personalities rather than programs. Harper is the strong but caring leader in uncertain times. Dion is the unrealistic egghead who is, Mr. Harper says, as radical as Pierre Trudeau.

It has been interesting to hear Harper conjure up Trudeau's ghost. It shows, first of all, that he has no appreciation of Canadian history -- perhaps because he was eleven years old during the October Crisis of 1970. But, more than that, Harper's resurrection of Trudeau reveals that he has fundamentally misunderstood the man and his importance to the country. Harper, unlike Joe Clark, does not have to face Trudeau in a debate. Those of us who remember can imagine what Trudeau's reaction to Harper's "Quebec, a nation within a nation" resolution would have been.

However, in one sense, Harper is like Trudeau. He is trying to don the cape of what Richard Gwyn called The Northern Magus -- the Canadian magician. By focusing on personalities rather than programs, Harper is using the time honoured magician's trick of creating a diversion. Better to focus on the man rather than on what the man has done -- and to create the illusion of prosperity.

And what has been done is much bigger than Harper himself. It is, indeed, ironic that the election was called on the day that the American government decided to bailout Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Not only is it the biggest bailout in American history. It also reveals the literal and figurative fraud behind neo-conservative economic theory. That theory has led to the concentration of wealth at the top of society, while the wages of the vast majority of North Americans have remained stagnant.

At the same time, the gurus of the theory claimed that they wanted to make home ownership affordable for all. Instead of raising wages as the cost of housing went up, these folks made it easier for the middle and lower classes to go into debt. In the United States that policy spawned the sub prime mortgage. In Canada it spawned the forty year mortgage. In both cases, when interest rates rose, homeowners were caught in the downdraft.

The rest of the Harper record is, likewise, a fraud. The man who promised transparency has consistently thumbed his nose at any type of parliamentary oversight. The man who promised to banish corruption from the capitol has not answered allegations about the "financial considerations" which were offered the late Chuck Cadman; or the allegations surrounding the financing of the last Conservative election campaign. Last, but certainly not least, the man who claimed to know a lot about economics has been a prodigal son. As with Fannie and Freddie, taxpayers have been left holding the bag -- and, having blown through a $12 billion surplus, that bag is getting heavier. By calling an election, the prime minster is trying to make all these troubles disappear.

Last week, at the Republican National Convention, Rick Davis -- John McCain's campaign manager -- claimed that the American election was going to be about personalities. Americans heard a great deal about McCain the war hero, while McCain himself announced that "change is coming." Now the Republicans are in the ludicrous position of running against themselves. It will take a real magician to keep the Republicans in power. But polls suggest they are making headway.

Just as polls suggest that Mr. Harper is in striking distance of a majority government here. However, as Barack Obama keeps reminding his audiences, the election is not about him. It's about them. Harper is desperately trying to make the Canadian election about him. But it's about -- in fact, in any democracy it's always about -- us. The task of separating illusion from reality is now in our hands.

The Fat is in the Fire

All minority governments eventually engineer their own downfall. Stephen Harper has indicated that, within the next two months, the House of Commons will be presented with three no confidence motions. The budget, by definition, is one such motion. But why bring the Afghanistan mission to a vote, and why now? Likewise, does the Senate's attempt to revise the government's crime legislation merit the no confidence threshold?

Mr. Harper will claim, of course, that all three pieces of legislation are matters of principle. But the truth is that the clock has been ticking on the Harper government for a long time. Moreover, this government has lasted longer than the average eighteen month tenure for minority governments in Canada. The simple fact is, as James Travers pointed out in The Toronto Star on Saturday, the tide is turning against Harper. The economic downturn in the United States is about to hit us -- in Ontario and Quebec's manufacturing plants it already has -- and the political tide, which long ago went out on George W. Bush, is now turning left. Mr. Harper will find it harder to deal with the next American president and Congress.

And, besides, the political war room which the Conservatives established a year ago has been given precious little to do -- except to produce attack ads against Stephane Dion. Those ads are going to be the chief weapon in Mr. Harper's arsenal. And, truth be told, the awkward Mr. Dion is a ripe target for parody.

Even if France provides enough troops to meet the reinforcement threshold recommended in the Manley Report, those troops will still not be enough to turn around the situation in Afghanistan. And there will not be a significant shift in NATO troop deployments until after the American election. The decision to extend the mission does not have to be made now. If an extension is needed immediately after the American election, that extension can be for six months, not two years. The British and the Russians knew something about invading Afghanistan -- but Mr. Bush and his enablers disregarded their experience, then left NATO holding the bag. Mr. Harper seems to feel that there is something heroic -- like Horatio at the bridge -- in holding that bag.

The crime bill, which echoes American sentencing guidelines -- and has led to one of the highest rates of citizen incarceration in the world -- is also a flawed piece of legislation. And the budget, as many economists have pointed out, makes paltry investments in human capital and infrastructure. Instead of investing the surpluses of the last several years, Mr. Harper and Company have reduced taxes in an across the board fashion, rather than targeting areas which require government support to secure the nation's future. Government investment in the Conservative lexicon is an oxymoron. The textbook says that investment is the job of private entrepreneurs.

For the Prime Minister, a true believer in Milton's Friedman's Revolution, holds fast to the economic dogma of the last thirty years, even as the evidence of its failure mounts. All he can offer in its defense is a set of personal attacks, which he has used most recently against Linda Keen -- and which he will use against his political opponents. His confidence belies a deeper sense of desperation. What he wants is a majority government before he is declared irrelevant. The next few months will determine whether or not he gets his wish.