For the most part I agree with his take, although I’m a bit more worried that the new Liberal government is going to spend far more money than they should (after a decade away from the treasury, they’re going to be extra-enthusiastic to throw money at favourite causes):
As a civilization, we have largely abandoned churches, recoiled from traditional labour unions, psychically detached from our employers and anathematized even harmless forms of ethnic rivalry. The typical citizen no longer enjoys a lot of everyday opportunities to experience a sense of collective belonging. Elections provide one.
According to a famous principle of sociology, they become more convenient for this purpose, and increase in bitterness, as the actual stakes dwindle. As it happens, we are in a time of relatively inconsequential elections. The national-unity issue is mostly dormant. Our prime minister doesn’t carry a nuclear football or control the central bank. We discuss immigration knowing that every party will give us high levels of it, with minor differences in the sorting method; the wide Atlantic guarantees that there will be no uncontrolled deluge.
There is a free-trade deal on the table, raising the question whether the total number of countries we have such deals with shall be the existing 44, or something in the low 50s. Macroeconomists, appealed to for judgments on the programs of the major parties, issue the sophisticated equivalent of yawns. Tell me what world commodity prices will do, they say, and I will tell you how the Dominion fares.
Faced with a choice between two no-deficits parties and a small-deficit party, it is natural for voters to seize upon nugatory considerations of style — to reward, as we will on Monday, positivity and novelty and attitudinal correctness; to punish hints of callousness and cynicism. Overreacting to personalities and subtleties and infinitesimal linguistic cues is a luxury we have, and we use it. In truth, all our political parties are now prisoners of accountants; it is not a question of some sinister “neoliberal consensus” but of solvency. Ask the Greeks: a country can have just as much sovereignty as it can afford.
We are entering a period of demographic transition in which economic growth, as measured by traditional instruments like GDP, is likely to be low for awhile. At the same time, mind-shredding innovations are already reordering our lives in radical but less easily measured ways. The connected computer and the increasingly intelligent automaton have transformed the human condition without much permission or encouragement from politicians.
I have to admit, when I see a fellow columnist wringing his hands about the niqab or the Mike Duffy trial, my instinct is always to say: “Hey, you know they have self-driving cars now?”
Update: I missed Mark Steyn’s pre-election column that at least somewhat explains why even Conrad Black turned on Harper this time around:
Conrad actually makes a rather better case for Harper than the pro-Harper piece from Canadian Cincinnatus – before deciding it’s time to take a flyer on Justin. My old boss has (entirely legitimate) grievances against the Prime Minister that most of his critics do not. In recent weeks, two prominent conservative figures in the Canadian commentariat have remarked to me on Harper’s “coldness” even with friendly media types. That’s true, certainly when compared to his delightful and friendly missus, or to, say, the bonhomous Jason Kenney or Lisa Raitt, who manage to give the impression they enjoy even hostile interviews. Harper is a cold fish, and the coldness isn’t just a social affect. Last year, Harper had Conrad expelled from the Privy Council, as cold-hearted an act as one could devise to humiliate a man who played a crucial role in the glory days of The National Post in both the creation of the new Conservative Party and the rise of Harper to lead it. It was not merely unjust but unnecessary, coming years after Conrad’s stitch-up in a corrupt US court for a “crime” that does not exist in any other western nation. I have no idea why Harper felt he had to do it, and, all things considered, Conrad is extremely generous to him in his column. But I do wonder how many lesser known, broadly conservative persons are nursing various grievances against Harper this morning. That never helps in a close election.
In democratic societies, when a long governing party loses to its principal rival, it’s because the rival has been forced, in the interests of electoral viability, to meet you halfway – to steal at least some your clothes. Mrs Thatcher forced the Labour Party to change, and thus enabled it to anoint Tony Blair and return to power shorn of its worst impulses. Likewise, the Reagan-Bush years led to Bill Clinton and the “New Democrats”. Even in Canada, Brian Mulroney tamped down the Trudeaupian excesses of the Liberals and enabled Jean Chrétien to succeed as head a Nafta-supporting, debt-reducing ministry. Should tonight go badly, there will be no such consolations for Stephen Harper: Justin Trudeau, in all his shallow modish twerpery, represents everything he despises.
