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COMMENTARY
January 21, 2006
Predictions
The polls show the election race tightening. They seem to show that people in the Atlantic provinces, Montreal, and Toronto -- all Liberal bedrock in recent elections -- are having third thoughts about their second thoughts to maybe vote for the Conservatives this time. With an unprecedented number of “undecided”, I think it would be foolish to make election predictions even two days ahead. We’ll see what we see.If the Liberals do better than expected on Monday, it will certainly have been because their scare campaign finally succeeded -- the dirtiest and most vicious politics we have seen in post-War Canada, and perhaps through our whole national history. But that in itself is no reason to despair. As I argued Wednesday, it is a scorched-earth strategy that will give diminishing returns in every subsequent election. The Internet is growing constantly, undermining the ability of any candidate to utter howlers or perform sleights that sympathetic media might once have let pass. Moreover, diversity of views and interests is re-entering the old media, via the “500-channel universe”. One may see this in the development of opinion on medicare in Canada. It wasn’t an issue in this election. It was instead the “dog that didn’t bark” -- for the Liberals could previously call open season on any opponent, simply by announcing that the poor defenceless creature was "in favour of two-tiered health care”. But over the last couple of years, even the Liberals’ own political constituencies have been won over to the idea that our radically socialist public health system will have to be radically overhauled, if we are ever to be free of the waiting room arrangements with which most Canadians have become so painfully familiar. The Liberals realized there was no traction left in the “two tiers” scare, and so quietly abandoned it. The same will be true, in years to come, on many other policy fronts. The reduction of complex issues in foreign affairs and defence to Yankee-baiting, or in almost every aspect of our social and economic order to dark insinuations, becomes impracticable once real debates have begun. And those debates are already happening, in the blogosphere and elsewhere in the web, beyond the ability of the left-liberal establishment to squelch. Hard information is being circulated into each discussion, and contrary to current popular belief, the debunking power of the Internet is such that hard information gradually pushes soft slander out of the field. Even on the vexing abortion front, advances in medical imaging are bringing home to people that the thing in a woman's womb is not a tumour or other lump or "just a foetus” -- but a child. This convinces me that the struggle to re-criminalize abortion, which remains beyond current Conservative Party horizons, will nevertheless eventually be taken up and won. The deceitful reduction of the issue to “a woman’s right to control her own body” cannot long withstand contact with the evidence of one’s own eyes. (However, victory on other “lifestyle” fronts, such as “the definition of marriage”, cannot yet be anticipated.) My chief fear for Monday is that the Liberals will have reduced what was developing into a clear Conservative majority, to a slight Conservative, or even Liberal minority, in a hung Parliament. Who holds that minority makes a world of difference, for if it is the Liberals, we may never get to the bottom of massive scandals and corruption at which the Gomery revelations have only hinted. But should they succeed in clinging to power a little longer -- perhaps with the temporary support of both the Bloc and the NDP -- the ultimate disaster for the Liberal Party will be on a larger scale. This is why even loyal Grits, with the benefit of foresight, will be voting Tory on Monday -- voting, in short, to get the unavoidable fever over with. Voting to take their medicine, and get on with their cure. For all these reasons, I will be pleased by almost any foreseeable result Monday. A majority for the Conservatives will save the country a great deal of unnecessary pain and expense, by leaving them to govern without having to buy off one or more of the opposition parties, with their expensive hobbyhorses. But even a functional Conservative minority, or a hung Parliament that necessitates yet another election, will move things along in a better direction. (A Liberal majority would be a national disaster, but that isn’t going to happen.) Still more broadly: we only ever know if an election was an important one, after the event. This one looks very important, and interesting given an electorate so volatile, but we'll have to wait months or years to appreciate what we will have done on Monday. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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