Canada Adopts New Bush-Style Politics
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Canada Adopts New Bush-Style Politics
Via NY Transfer News Collective * All the News that Doesn't Fit
Consortiumnews - Oct 13, 2006
http://www.consortiumnews.com/2006/101306c.html
Canada's New Bush-Style Politics
By Richard Fricker
As an American journalist visiting my wife's relatives in Canada, I've always
been struck by how ardently the countrys political discourse focused on
substance -- the budget, health care, schools, roads with little of the cheap
theatrics and angry divisiveness of U.S. politics and punditry.
Reading and listening to the Canadian news media during those family trips
could be a tad boring, but it also was touching, like remembering your
earnest grade-school civics teacher lecturing about the wonders of the
American democratic process.
But in my visit this past summer, I noticed that the tone of Canada
suddenly had changed. There was a nastier edge to the commentary. There
were not so subtle appeals to racism and xenophobia, references to Muslim
neighborhoods in Quebec as Quebecistan and to Lebanese-Canadians as
Hezbocrats, a play on the Muslim group Hezbollah.
To someone who has covered U.S. politics for three decades, there was a
shock of recognition. Standing out starkly against the bland traditions of
Canadian governance was the pugnacious tude of American political combat,
wedge issues pounded in with a zeal that put the goal of winning and
holding power over everything else.
It was as if a virus that had long infected the people south of the border
had overnight jumped containment and spread northward establishing itself
in a new host population. But as I began to study this new phenomenon it
became clear that this infection did not just accidentally break
quarantine.
Rather, it was willfully injected into the Canadian body politic by
conservative strategists and right-wing media moguls who had studied the
modern American model and were seeking to replicate it.
Canadas Prime Minister Stephen Harper even brought in Republican advisers,
such as political consultant Frank Luntz, to give pointers on how the
ruling Conservative Party could become as dominant in Canada as the GOP is
in the United States.
Canada had its version of Rupert Murdoch and Fox News in the Asper brothers
and their CanWest Global Communications Corp., which owns the National
Post, the Montreal Gazette and nine other Canadian newspapers, 25
television outlets and two radio stations.
It was the Montreal Gazette and the National Post that trumpeted the phrase
Quebecistan after demonstrators in Ottawa and Montreal protested Israels
bombardment of Lebanon in summer 2006.
Columnist Don MacPherson equated those protests, where some demonstrators
waved Hezbollah flags, with pro-terrorism. Its finally becoming respectable
again to express support for terrorists, MacPherson wrote on Aug. 8, 2006,
in the Montreal Gazette.
Meanwhile, CanWests National Post offered up a Canadian version of Ann
Coulter in columnist Barbara Kay.
In one of Kays columns, she noted that 50,000 Lebanese-Canadians lived in
Montreal and added, We can expect those numbers to swell as
Hezbollah-supporting residents of southern Lebanon cash in on their
Canadian citizenship and flee to safety.
Kay denounced Quebec as the most anti-Israel of the provinces and therefore
the most vulnerable to tolerance for Islamist causes.
The word would go out to the Islamophere that Quebec was the Londonistan,
Kay wrote. It wont if our political class takes its cues from principled
Stephen Harper rather than shameless Quebec politicians who led the
pro-terrorist rally.
Clone de Bush
Harper, Canadas photogenic 47-year-old prime minister, has emerged as the
face of modern Canadian conservatism much the way George W. Bush has come
to personify right-wing politics in the United States.
Born in Toronto in 1959, Harper moved west to Alberta in 1978 to work in
the petroleum industry. Similarly, Bush cut his teeth as a Texas oilman,
albeit a failed one.
Much as that oilfield experience shaped Bushs persona and Texas money
fueled the American Right, so too did Alberta and its oil industry
influence the political development of Harper and the emergence of modern
Canadian conservatism.
Harper earned a bachelors degree and his masters in economics from the
University of Calgary. By 1985, then in his mid-20s, he had turned to
politics, gaining recognition as a bright operative and landing a job as
chief aide to a Tory member of Parliament named Jim Hawkes.
But Harper grew disenchanted with the compromising style of Canadas Tories
who like Prime Minister Brian Mulroney often worked collaboratively with
other political parties in Ottawa to maintain social programs for
Canadians. Harper concluded that Mulroneys Progressive Conservative Party
was too liberal, so he quit it in 1986.
At age 28, Harper was recruited by Preston Manning, the founder of Canadas
Reform Party, and became the partys chief political officer. Harper ran for
the House of Commons against his old mentor, Hawkes, in 1988, losing badly.
But the defeat did not dampen Harpers political ambitions. He continued to
puzzle over how a revamped conservative movement might shake up Canadian
politics and ultimately gain power.
For inspiration in building this new brand of Canadian conservatism, Harper
looked to Washington, where Rep. Newt Gingrich, R-Georgia, was promoting a
combative style designed to shatter the longtime Democratic grip on the
U.S. House of Representatives. In Gingrichs view, Republicans had to
replace cooperation with confrontation.
In 1993, Harper ran for the House of Commons again, this time aided by a
tactic pioneered by U.S. conservatives having ostensibly independent
organizations tear down ones opponent with large sums of money outside the
legal limits on campaign spending.
In this case, a group called the National Citizens Coalition went on the
offensive against MP Hawkes, undermining his political support enough so
that Harper was able to win the seat in Calgary West.
Harper was learning, too, from conservative spinmeister Frank Luntz, who
helped Gingrich draft the Contract With America, which became the
centerpiece of the Republican victory in the U.S. Congress in 1994. Luntz
was a specialist at the take-no-prisoners-style of politics that envisioned
permanent conservative control of Washington.
Harper picked up other tips from Bushs political adviser Karl Rove, such as
the importance of transforming the Christian evangelical movement into an
activist base for conservative politics.
Harpers brash conservatism grated on the more populist positions of
Mannings Reform Party, which once rebuked Harper for not standing with the
partys internal policies. For his part, Harper considered Manning too
inclined to compromise.
In January 1997, Harper resigned his Reform Party seat in Parliament and
went to work as vice president of the National Citizens Coalition, the
outside organization that had helped Harper defeat Hawkes in 1993.
Harper soon rose to be the coalitions president and served notice that the
group would become a vehicle for smashing Canadas political status quo.
In a speech in the United States to a major conservative organization, the
Council for National Policy, Harper declared that Canada is a Northern
European welfare state in the worse sense of the term, and very proud of
it.
Harper also mocked Canadians as complacent and ill-informed. If youre like
most Americans, you know almost nothing except for your own country, he
told his CNP audience. Which makes you probably knowledgeable about one
more country than most Canadians.
Back in Canada, Harper also began ratcheting up the political rhetoric,
co-authoring an article referring to Canadas Liberal government as a benign
dictatorship held together by incompetence. The article also sought
conservative unity and praised the hard-edged right-wing commentary in
media outlets owned by mogul Conrad Black.
Harper cobbled together a platform of issues that exploited Canadas latent
social, cultural and economic resentments. He proposed raising the age of
sexual consent, permitting more corporal punishment of children, initiating
a program similar to school vouchers, and resisting issues that favored
French-speaking Quebec.
As this Americanized version of Canadian conservatism took shape, Harper
was cribbing, too, from another rising U.S. politician, George W. Bush.
Harper said his goal was to tap into a political base similar to what
George Bush tapped.
New Party
Amid a surge of anti-minority sentiments, Harper merged his operations at
the Canadian Conservative Alliance with those of Peter MacKay, the last
leader of the Progressive Conservative Party. In 2003, they officially
formed the Conservative Party of Canada.
Their timing was perfect. As with the congressional Democrats in the United
States a decade earlier, the Canadian Liberal Party found itself beset with
corruption allegations and suffering from growing public resentment about
high taxes.
In contrast to these tainted Liberals was the fresh-faced Harper at the
head of a shiny new movement with powerful backing from right-wing interest
groups, neoconservative media outlets and stirred-up social conservatives.
Though Conrad Blacks media empire had collapsed in a financial scandal,
some of his properties, such as the National Post, were snapped up by
CanWest Global, which shared Blacks staunchly pro-Israeli stance on Middle
East affairs.
Harper also brought into play evangelical Protestants, through his
membership in the Christian and Missionary Alliance, which opposed gay
rights, was staunchly anti-abortion and targeted North Africas Muslims for
conversion to Christianity.
In 2004, Harper engineered a political breakthrough for the Conservatives
in Ontario, boosting their standing in the House of Commons by 25 seats.
This new conservative coalition flexed its muscles again in January 2006,
denying the Liberals control of Parliament by claiming 124 seats (out of
308) and putting Harper in position to piece together a coalition
government, which he did.
Harper was sworn in as Canadas new prime minister on Feb. 6, 2006,
consolidating right-wing political power across the North American
continent. President Bush finally had a likeminded Canadian leader who also
shared Washingtons neoconservative doctrine for confronting the Islamic
world.
The tone of Canadian political discourse has followed this shift in the
government, especially with CanWest media outlets ready to trumpet news
that puts the Islamic world in the worst possible light.
For instance, on May 19, 2006, the National Post published a front-page
article by expatriate Iranian journalist Amir Taheri, claiming that Iran
was enacting legislation that would require color-coded badges for
Christians, Jews and Zoroastrians.
Jews would be marked out with a yellow strip of cloth sewn in front of
their clothes while Christians will be assigned the colour red and
Zoroastrians would wear blue, Taheri reported in the article distributed by
Benador Associates, a public relations firm representing neoconservative
writers, such as Michael Ledeen and Richard Perle.
With its obvious Holocaust allusion, Taheris story flashed around the
world, picked up by the New York Post, Rush Limbaugh and the powerful
U.S.-Israeli lobbying group, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.
Harper and Australias Prime Minister John Howard, who was visiting Canada,
joined in denouncing Iran for the purported badge legislation.
However, Taheris article turned out to be untrue. The Iranian legislation
contained nothing about making religious minorities wear colored badges.
After the facts were challenged, the National Post retracted the story and
later published an apology.
Media Confrontation
In June 2006, Harper applied another lesson from the U.S. Republican
playbook: Even with a supportive right-wing news media protecting your
flanks, still pick a fight with the rest of the national news media.
Claiming to be victimized by hostile questions from Parliament Hill
reporters, Harper announced that he would favor regional news outlets with
interviews, while shunning the supposedly elitist national press corps.
I have trouble believing that a Liberal prime minister would have this
problem, but the press gallery at the leadership level has taken an
anti-Conservative view, Harper said, ignoring the role the same journalists
had played in highlighting Liberal Party corruption which cleared the way
for the Conservative Party victory.
Harper mandated that reporters sign up in advance to ask questions at news
conferences and then weeded out journalists considered too liberal,
according to Yves Malo, president of the press corps gallery.
Harpers staff made it very clear they were taking their cue from the White
House, Malo told me. They were always telling us how things were done in
Washington. The first time we resisted we were called liberals. Now, were
called liberal ideologues.
Much as Bush speaks almost exclusively before friendly, well-screened
audiences, Harper tends to grant exclusive interviews to CanWest media
outlets, Malo said.
Despite the lingering embarrassment over the bogus colored badge story,
CanWests neoconservative attitudes resurfaced in July 2006 when war broke
out between Israel and Lebanon.
As Israeli bombers inflicted heavy civilian casualties in Lebanon in
retaliation for Hezbollahs capture of two Israeli soldiers,
Lebanese-Canadians staged protests demanding that Israel cease its attacks.
Montreal Gazette columnist MacPherson chastised Quebec politicians who
attended the rally for not condemning Hezbollah and for not discouraging
Hezbollah sympathizers from participating. National Post writer Kay termed
the rally virulently anti-Israel.
Launched from CanWests newspapers, the words Quebecistan and Hezbocrats
were suddenly buzzing through Canadas public debate.
While this kind of divisive rhetoric is common in the United States and is
even encouraged as a way to energize the political base, it marked an
escalation of political stridency for Canada.
Some of that fury seems to have subsided since a ceasefire took hold
between Lebanon and Israel in late summer. But the larger question remains
whether Harper will succeed in transforming Canada into a more belligerent
and bellicose nation, much as Bush has done in the United States.
For generations, Canada has prided itself on its well-liked image around
the world. It is a nation renowned for sending peacekeepers abroad not
occupying armies. Aside from ice hockey and occasional over-indulgence in
beer drinking, Canadians are known for their civility, not combativeness.
There is also the possibility that having seen the consequences of
right-wing governance in the United States, Canadians will recoil at the
thought of losing their pleasant country with its national health insurance
and fairly comfortable lifestyle, in favor of the more cut-throat economic
system south of the border.
Some analysts suspect, too, that the Bush connection could ultimately hurt
Harper, who is sometimes referred to as un clone de Bush. With Canadian
troops dying in Afghanistan and violence rising in the Middle East, Harpers
coziness with Bush may become a liability as it has been for British Prime
Minister Tony Blair.
Over the past several months, Harper has seen his popularity decline and
the backing of his coalition partners erode. It remains to be seen if
Harper's American-style conservatism can survive let alone thrive in Canada.
The Liberal Party after selecting new leadership in December is expected to
force a new round of elections early in 2007. That election may well turn
out to be a test of whether the American brand of conservatism has a future
as a political export.
*
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