LiveWire

After the wonderful victory for conservatives in Canada’s election, I thought we should get more of a detailed analysis on the event. My thanks to Canadian TAM Neil Flagg with a report on how they did it.

A post by TAM Neil Flagg

May 2, 2011 was a magical day for this Canadian TAM. After 13 hours in and around the polling station, the results started pouring in, and the news was good: not only was Stephen Harper and his Conservative Party of Canada on its way to a huge victory across the country, but my own district of York Centre had defeated the Liberal Party candidate for the first time in my lifetime. Would you like to know how it happened? How did Michael Moore’s open-door, free-medicine, gun-free worker’s paradise become a Tea Party Nation? It turns out that, when the fat boy from Flint made his America-bashing, Canada-hearting documentary Bowling for Columbine in 2002, we were already well into a revolution that took the entrenched and established political order, and flipped it right on its head. America, you can learn some lessons from Canada’s Prime Minister, the man who almost single-handedly re-aligned the political landscape, and brought conservatism from the fringes of Canadian society to majority rule in Parliament.

First of all, you need to know the magnitude of what was accomplished. The two establishment parties that ruled Canada for its first 130 years – the Progressive Conservatives, and the Liberal Party – have essentially been wiped out, thanks to Stephen Harper. Imagine one independent actor, from outside the establishment, replacing the Republican Party and all its RINO leaders with a small-c Conservative party, and using that new party to reduce the Democrats to, say, 10 seats in the Senate and 50 in the House over the course of three election cycles. This is the magnitude of what Stephen Harper has done over the past 10 years. And he did it by acting against the advice of all the experts who told him it would never happen – that conservatives needed to be the party of “compromise”, and that Liberals will always be the dominant party in our system (they finished a distant third yesterday, with 34 out of 308 seats).

With an accomplishment like this, you’d think we had some sort of Messianic figure arrive – a man who could calm the seas and cure the suffering and make women faint at his speeches. But what we had was actually an anti-Obama: a nerdy middle-class white kid from suburban Toronto, who found his calling in the pages of Hayek, Mises and Friedman studying economics at the University of Calgary, and whose charisma could generously be described by his greatest admirers as nearly absent. The man who delivered the Conservative Party to majority rule is all substance, little style. A policy wonk Superman. On his best days, I’d compare him to John Bolton, if Bolton lost the moustache, the smile, and the great one-liners.

His success has been based not on brilliant speeches, but on sound principles, bold tactics, and brilliant strategy. In the face of outright hostility from the elites, Harper has stood behind Israel so strongly that he cost Canada a seat on the UN Security Council. Leftists tried to use that against him – it failed. Against the advice of elite economists, he chose to reduce the federal consumption tax (GST) by 28%, allowing individuals keep more of their own money. Leftists and establishment liberals tried to use that against him – it failed. Harper took the highly unusual move of shutting down Parliament in 2008 to stop a coalition of left-wing parties from overthrowing his government and seizing power. The left tried to use that against him in this past next election, calling him a “dictator” – and not only did it fail, but Harper used the issue as his main argument to the public in asking for a majority mandate. The examples are endless – Harper makes a bold move, defends it on principle, and lets his opponents tie themselves in knots trying to convince the public he was wrong.

Of course, Harper’s opposition assisted in its own demise. The Liberals helped destroy themselves through the sin of arrogance, offering up big-government policies in an era of Tea Party ascendancy, and forcing an annointed Harvard Professor (Michael Ignatieff) onto the public as their leader, without making him face so much as an internal party election. The Bloc Quebecois, the Quebec-only separatist party that at one point held the status of Official Opposition in Parliament, was essentially eliminated as a party last night. The official opposition is now the doomed-to-implode New Democratic Party, whose constitution is openly socialist, and whose members include avowed communists.

Still, what put Harper over the top to his majority on May 2 was a phenomenon known as “Ford Nation”, which earned him a ring of electoral district victories in the suburban area surrounding Toronto, and a swath of seats within Toronto proper for the first time since he founded his party in 2004. “Ford Nation” refers to Rob Ford, the fat, uncouth, anti-establishment budget-slashing city councillor, who ran for mayor of Toronto in October 2010 to howls of mockery from the elites, and won in a landslide with a simple, clear, consistent message: “Stop the gravy train”. It was Tea Party in action, and it worked brilliantly, in a city that was previously considered to be a socialist fortress. An army of independent businesspeople, modest homeowners, sports fans, and non-welfare immigrants came out to bring Ford victory, and in the days leading up to the election, Ford activated them again in full force with an endorsement for Harper.

The arc of the story is essentially that of a Canadian Tea Party: Harper harnessed the energy of those across the country who were sick and tired of paying the bill for socialist schemes and elitist corruption, and rode it to ultimate victory. The next chapter is about to begin: will he fall to the temptations of power, and be corrupted by the near-absolute control a majority government has in our system? Now in his early 50s, will he implement the libertarian agenda he advocated publicly for in his 20s and 30s? With the media disgraced and the opposition neutralized, the pressure on Stephen Harper will now come exclusively from the right – which is exactly how it should be. Remember those doorknob liberals who threatened to move en masse to Canada after W won re-election in ’04? The timing may now be right – our unemployment is lower, our dollar is higher, and our train keeps moving in the right direction. Our taxes are still too high and our government is still far too involved in our lives. But hope and change may finally have arrived.

Neil Flagg is a independent business owner in Toronto who blogs occasionally at http://flaggman.wordpress.com, and tweets regularly @neilflagg.