Matthew Yglesias has things to say about Canada! He posits that, culturally speaking, non-Southern Americans and non-Quebecois Canadians are pretty much the same, which, in some respects, is certainly true...Canadians watch Survivor too, and listen to techno, and so forth. Day-to-day life is more or less the same, up there and down here. Outside of Quebec, the accents you're likely to hear are no more exotic than you'd find in Maine or Wisconsin or on the set of Fargo. But he goes too far! Quoth he:
Another way of seeing this is that if Québec were to seceed, Canada would have competitive two-party politics between the Alliance and the Liberals much like our two-party system in the US (complete with annoying NDP/Green types).
...Which is just silly.
I feel I would be remiss in my duties as Official Go-To Guy for Canadian local politics (anointed in the comments to Mr Matthew's post by no less a personage than the puissant and benevolent Patrick Nielsen Hayden, though I'm pretty sure I won this crown by default) if I did not raise my voice in defense of the NDP.
The NDP is not some Johnny-come-lately protest party of disaffected young people. The New Democratic Party is a real, viable, and active part of the Canadian political scene, with a heck of a lot of history behind it. Which is actually quite interesting. So I'll tell you about it.
The Ontario NDP has a rather extensive (by Internet standards) set of pages devoted to the party's history and origins. (A few of them, alas, don't seem to be there...But, mirabile dictu, I've found a backup.) And, warming the heart of dedicated readers everywhere, they offer an extensive bibliography. The NDP grew up from the most unlikely roots...A sort of union between Progressives, labour, and farmers. The NDP as such came into existence in 1961, but it evolved pretty directly from much older movements. Some of these, the United Farmers of Ontario and the Independent Labour Party, actually managed to win the Ontario provincial elections and form a government, way way back in 1919, the year of the Winnipeg General Strike. They held onto power for a few years, and later rallied round the socialist banner with labour and farmers' movements spanning Canada to form the Co-Operative Commonwealth Federation, an avowedly socialist party originally run by James Shaver Woodsworth, an MP for Winnipeg. (There's been a lot of Winnipeg in Canadian progressive politics. How curious that progressivism should sprout up in the prairies...) How socialist were they, you ask? Read their Regina Manifesto of 1933 for yourself, and see! They supported a planned, socialised economy, achieved through democratic reforms without violence. The CCF met with some real political success, electing MPs and winning power in Saskatchewan in 1944, under the short yet passionate Tommy Douglas. The democratic socialist CCF government lasted five terms in Saskatchewan, which I find an utterly gobsmacking feat in a rural, prairie province. Of course, the Cold War was not kind to the CCF; the damnable Stalinists were giving socialists everywhere a bad name. The CCF reinvented itself as a much less extreme party, dropping the Regina Manifesto's commitment to the abolition of capitalism and the creation of a centrally-planned economy, officially becoming the grudgingly capitalist but socially-democratic (as opposed to democratic socialist) New Democratic Party in 1961. You can see yourself how their views have evolved over time, through the declarations and manifestoes kindly assembled by the NDP Socialist Caucus. The NDP has been for over forty years a viable, visible, and influential party of the genuine left; though they haven't formed a government or official opposition on the federal level, they've come close to opposition status, and they have formed provincial governments in British Columbia, Ontario, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba, the latter two of which are still in NDP hands. (There may have been others, in the Atlantic provinces, but I don't think so, and I didn't feel like checking.)
They still tell the fable of Mouseland.
The next federal election probably won't be too kind to the NDP, but the party remains a political force with a genuinely useful role to play, not to mention its vitality on the provincial level. There really isn't anything in the US to compare with it.
There are a lot of things about Canadian politics that brook no comparison. The Republicans in the US have never gone through anything like the massive and amusing meltdown and factionalisation the Canadian Tories experienced after Jean Chretien's Liberals came to power, the Tories themselves slipping into obscurity, the firebrand quasi-populist asshole Reform Party raising up in the prairies and becoming the Alliance yet completely and pathologically unable to get a break anywhere east of Manitoba (though Reform did manage one MP from Ontario, once...once), and the weird regional dynamics of the conservative-with-a-small-c parties on the provincial level like the Saskatchewan Party and the BC Liberals (who are not liberal; mainly free-enterprise, anti-labour, small government, low tax pro-property rights types; though they did promise not to go around privatising anything)...Even if and when the Tories and the Alliance hammer out all the details of their reunion, and even if Quebec was magicked off the face of the Earth by tea-time, you would still not end up with anything remotely approximating the American system, with a runaway conservative party pissing in the eye-sockets of democracy, and the putative liberals desperately trying to remember where they'd hidden their proverbial cojones...What you'd end up with would be, well, Canada. The Liberals would still be pretty unstoppable, the NDP would still be considerable, the Conservatives would still get smacked down like the punk little bitches they are.
Not to mention all the other meaningful differences between America and Canada, like Canada's First Nations population, Canada's at times halfhearted and grudging but still meaningful bilingualism, its absence of American arrogance, its humble view of its place in the larger world, its far more reasonable football rules (the Blue Bombers are 11 and 7) and spelling...
And it's just so gosh-darned nice up there!
I rest my case.
Posted by aloysius at November 11, 2003 02:55 PM | TrackBack |