April Fools Day and this is a good time to see take a look at Harpers views and see how much he has fooled the Canadian people.
Harper has not changed his views very much, this speech with some areas highlighted should help understand his vision.
OTTAWA — The text from a speech made by
Stephen Harper, then vice-president of the National Citizens Coalition, to a
June 1997 Montreal meeting of the Council for National Policy, a right-wing U.S.
think tank, and taken from the council's website:
Ladies and gentlemen, let me begin by giving you a big welcome to Canada.
Let's start up with a compliment. You're here from the second greatest nation on
earth. But seriously, your country, and particularly your conservative movement,
is a light and an inspiration to people in this country and across the
world.
Now, having given you a compliment, let me also give you an insult. I was
asked to speak about Canadian politics. It may not be true, but it's legendary
that if you're like all Americans, you know almost nothing except for your own
country. Which makes you probably knowledgeable about one more country than most
Canadians.
But in any case, my speech will make that assumption. I'll talk fairly basic
stuff. If it seems pedestrian to some of you who do know a lot about Canada, I
apologize.
I'm going to look at three things. First of all, just some basic facts about
Canada that are relevant to my talk, facts about the country and its political
system, its civics. Second, I want to take a look at the party system that's
developed in Canada from a conventional left/right, or liberal/conservative
perspective. The third thing I'm going to do is look at the political system
again, because it can't be looked at in this country simply from the
conventional perspective.
First, facts about Canada. Canada is a Northern European welfare state in the
worst sense of the term, and very proud of it. Canadians make no connection
between the fact that they are a Northern European welfare state and the fact
that we have very low economic growth, a standard of living substantially lower
than yours, a massive brain drain of young professionals to your country, and
double the unemployment rate of the United States.
In terms of the unemployed, of which we have over a million-and-a-half, don't
feel particularly bad for many of these people. They don't feel bad about it
themselves, as long as they're receiving generous social assistance and
unemployment insurance.
That is beginning to change. There have been some significant changes in our
fiscal policies and our social welfare policies in the last three or four years.
But nevertheless, they're still very generous compared to your country.
Let me just make a comment on language, which is so important in this
country. I want to disabuse you of misimpressions you may have. If you've read
any of the official propagandas, you've come over the border and entered a
bilingual country. In this particular city, Montreal, you may well get that
impression. But this city is extremely atypical of this country.
While it is a French-speaking city -- largely -- it has an enormous
English-speaking minority and a large number of what are called ethnics: they
who are largely immigrant communities, but who politically and culturally tend
to identify with the English community.
This is unusual, because the rest of the province of Quebec is, by and large,
almost entirely French-speaking. The English minority present here in Montreal
is quite exceptional.
Furthermore, the fact that this province is largely French-speaking, except
for Montreal, is quite exceptional with regard to the rest of the country.
Outside of Quebec, the total population of francophones, depending on how you
measure it, is only three to five per cent of the population. The rest of Canada
is English speaking.
Even more important, the French-speaking people outside of Quebec live almost
exclusively in the adjacent areas, in northern New Brunswick and in Eastern
Ontario.
The rest of Canada is almost entirely English speaking. Where I come from,
Western Canada, the population of francophones ranges around one to two per cent
in some cases. So it's basically an English-speaking country, just as
English-speaking as, I would guess, the northern part of the United States.
But the important point is that Canada is not a bilingual country. It is a
country with two languages. And there is a big difference.
As you may know, historically and especially presently, there's been a lot of
political tension between these two major language groups, and between Quebec
and the rest of Canada.
Let me take a moment for a humorous story. Now, I tell this with some
trepidation, knowing that this is a largely Christian organization.
The National Citizens Coalition, by the way, is not. We're on the sort of
libertarian side of the conservative spectrum. So I tell this joke with a little
bit of trepidation. But nevertheless, this joke works with Canadian audiences of
any kind, anywhere in Canada, both official languages, any kind of audience.
It's about a constitutional lawyer who dies and goes to heaven. There, he
meets God and gets his questions answered about life. One of his questions is,
"God, will this problem between Quebec and the rest of Canada ever be
resolved?'' And God thinks very deeply about this, as God is wont to do. God
replies, "Yes, but not in my lifetime.''
I'm glad to see you weren't offended by that. I've had the odd religious
person who's been offended. I always tell them, "Don't be offended. The joke
can't be taken seriously theologically. It is, after all, about a lawyer who
goes to heaven.''
In any case. My apologies to Eugene Meyer of the Federalist Society.
Second, the civics, Canada's civics.
On the surface, you can make a comparison between our political system and
yours. We have an executive, we have two legislative houses, and we have a
Supreme Court.
However, our executive is the Queen, who doesn't live here. Her
representative is the Governor General, who is an appointed buddy of the Prime
Minister.
Of our two legislative houses, the Senate, our upper house, is appointed,
also by the Prime Minister, where he puts buddies, fundraisers and the like. So
the Senate also is not very important in our political system.
And we have a Supreme Court, like yours, which, since we put a charter of
rights in our constitution in 1982, is becoming increasingly arbitrary and
important. It is also appointed by the Prime Minister. Unlike your Supreme
Court, we have no ratification process.
So if you sort of remove three of the four elements, what you see is a system
of checks and balances which quickly becomes a system that's described as unpaid
checks and political imbalances.
What we have is the House of Commons. The House of Commons, the bastion of
the Prime Minister's power, the body that selects the Prime Minister, is an
elected body. I really emphasize this to you as an American group: It's not like
your House of Representatives. Don't make that comparison.
What the House of Commons is really like is the United States electoral
college. Imagine if the electoral college which selects your president once
every four years were to continue sitting in Washington for the next four years.
And imagine its having the same vote on every issue. That is how our political
system operates.
In our election last Monday, the Liberal party won a majority of seats. The
four opposition parties divided up the rest, with some very, very rough
parity.
But the important thing to know is that this is how it will be until the
Prime Minister calls the next election. The same majority vote on every issue.
So if you ask me, "What's the vote going to be on gun control?'' or on the
budget, we know already.
If any member of these political parties votes differently from his party on
a particular issue, well, that will be national headline news. It's really hard
to believe. If any one member votes differently, it will be national headline
news. I voted differently at least once from my party, and it was national
headline news. It's a very different system.
Our party system consists today of five parties. There was a remark made
yesterday at your youth conference about the fact that parties come and go in
Canada every year. This is rather deceptive. I've written considerably on this
subject.
We had a two-party system from the founding of our country, in 1867. That
two-party system began to break up in the period from 1911 to 1935. Ever since
then, five political elements have come and gone. We've always had at least
three parties. But even when parties come back, they're not really new. They're
just an older party re-appearing under a different name and different
circumstances.
Let me take a conventional look at these five parties. I'll describe them in
terms that fit your own party system, the left/right kind of terms.
Let's take the New Democratic Party, the NDP, which won 21 seats. The NDP
could be described as basically a party of liberal Democrats, but it's actually
worse than that, I have to say. And forgive me jesting again, but the NDP is
kind of proof that the Devil lives and interferes in the affairs of men.
This party believes not just in large government and in massive
redistributive programs, it's explicitly socialist. On social value issues, it
believes the opposite on just about everything that anybody in this room
believes. I think that's a pretty safe bet on all social-value kinds of
questions.
Some people point out that there is a small element of clergy in the NDP.
Yes, this is true. But these are clergy who, while very committed to the church,
believe that it made a historic error in adopting Christian theology.
The NDP is also explicitly a branch of the Canadian Labour Congress, which is
by far our largest labour group, and explicitly radical.
There are some moderate and conservative labour organizations. They don't
belong to that particular organization.
The second party, the Liberal party, is by far the largest party. It won the
election. It's also the only party that's competitive in all parts of the
country. The Liberal party is our dominant party today, and has been for 100
years. It's governed almost all of the last hundred years, probably about 75 per
cent of the time.
It's not what you would call conservative Democrat; I think that's a
disappearing kind of breed. But it's certainly moderate Democrat, a type of
Clinton-pragmatic Democrat. It's moved in the last few years very much to the
right on fiscal and economic concerns, but still believes in government
intrusion in the economy where possible, and does, in its majority, believe in
fairly liberal social values.
In the last Parliament, it enacted comprehensive gun control, well beyond, I
think, anything you have. Now we'll have a national firearms registration
system, including all shotguns and rifles. Many other kinds of weapons have been
banned. It believes in gay rights, although it's fairly cautious. It's put
sexual orientation in the Human Rights Act and will let the courts do the
rest.
There is an important caveat to its liberal social values. For historic
reasons that I won't get into, the Liberal party gets the votes of most
Catholics in the country, including many practising Catholics. It does have a
significant Catholic, social-conservative element which occasionally disagrees
with these kinds of policy directions. Although I caution you that even this
Catholic social conservative element in the Liberal party is often quite liberal
on economic issues.
Then there is the Progressive Conservative party, the PC party, which won
only 20 seats. Now, the term Progressive Conservative will immediately raise
suspicions in all of your minds. It should. It's obviously kind of an oxymoron.
But actually, its origin is not progressive in the modern sense. The origin of
the term "progressive'' in the name stems from the Progressive Movement in the
1920s, which was similar to that in your own country.
But the Progressive Conservative is very definitely liberal Republican. These
are people who are moderately conservative on economic matters, and in the past
have been moderately liberal, even sometimes quite liberal on social policy
matters.
In fact, before the Reform Party really became a force in the late '80s,
early '90s, the leadership of the Conservative party was running the largest
deficits in Canadian history. They were in favour of gay rights officially,
officially for abortion on demand. Officially -- what else can I say about them?
Officially for the entrenchment of our universal, collectivized, health-care
system and multicultural policies in the constitution of the country.
At the leadership level anyway, this was a pretty liberal group. This
explains one of the reasons why the Reform party has become such a power.
The Reform party is much closer to what you would call conservative
Republican, which I'll get to in a minute.
The Bloc Quebecois, which I won't spend much time on, is a strictly Quebec
party, strictly among the French-speaking people of Quebec. It is an ethnic
separatist party that seeks to make Quebec an independent, sovereign nation.
By and large, the Bloc Quebecois is centre-left in its approach. However, it
is primarily an ethnic coalition. It's always had diverse elements. It does have
an element that is more on the right of the political spectrum, but that's
definitely a minority element.
Let me say a little bit about the Reform party because I want you to be very
clear on what the Reform party is and is not.
The Reform party, although described by many of its members, and most of the
media, as conservative, and conservative in the American sense, actually
describes itself as populist. And that's the term its leader, Preston Manning,
uses.
This term is not without significance. The Reform party does stand for direct
democracy, which of course many American conservatives do, but also it sees
itself as coming from a long tradition of populist parties of Western Canada,
not all of which have been conservative.
It also is populist in the very real sense, if I can make American analogies
to it -- populist in the sense that the term is sometimes used with Ross
Perot.
The Reform party is very much a leader-driven party. It's much more a real
party than Mr. Perot's party -- by the way, it existed before Mr. Perot's party.
But it's very much leader-driven, very much organized as a personal political
vehicle. Although it has much more of a real organization than Mr. Perot
does.
But the Reform party only exists federally. It doesn't exist at the
provincial level here in Canada. It really exists only because Mr. Manning is
pursuing the position of prime minister. It doesn't have a broader political
mandate than that yet. Most of its members feel it should, and, in their minds,
actually it does.
It also has some Buchananist tendencies. I know there are probably many
admirers of Mr. Buchanan here, but I mean that in the sense that there are some
anti-market elements in the Reform Party. So far, they haven't been that
important, because Mr. Manning is, himself, a fairly orthodox economic
conservative.
The predecessor of the Reform party, the Social Credit party, was very much
like this. Believing in funny money and control of banking, and a whole bunch of
fairly non-conservative economic things.
So there are some non-conservative tendencies in the Reform party, but, that
said, the party is clearly the most economically conservative party in the
country. It's the closest thing we have to a neo-conservative party in that
sense.
It's also the most conservative socially, but it's not a theocon party, to
use the term. The Reform party does favour the use of referendums and free votes
in Parliament on moral issues and social issues.
The party is led by Preston Manning, who is a committed, evangelical
Christian. And the party in recent years has made some reference to family
values and to family priorities. It has some policies that are definitely
social-conservative, but it's not explicitly so.
Many members are not, the party officially is not, and, frankly, the party
has had a great deal of trouble when it's tried to tackle those issues.
Last year, when we had the Liberal government putting the protection of
sexual orientation in our Human Rights Act, the Reform Party was opposed to
that, but made a terrible mess of the debate. In fact, discredited itself on
that issue, not just with the conventional liberal media, but even with many
social conservatives by the manner in which it mishandled that.
So the social conservative element exists. Mr. Manning is a Christian, as are
most of the party's senior people. But it's not officially part of the party.
The party hasn't quite come to terms with how that fits into it.
That's the conventional analysis of the party system.
Let me turn to the non-conventional analysis, because frankly, it's
impossible, with just left/right terminology to explain why we would have five
parties, or why we would have four parties on the conventional spectrum. Why not
just two?
The reason is regional division, which you'll see if you carefully look at a
map. Let me draw the United States comparison, a comparison with your
history.
The party system that is developing here in Canada is a party system that
replicates the antebellum period, the pre-Civil War period of the United
States.
That's not to say -- and I would never be quoted as saying -- we're headed to
a civil war. But we do have a major secession crisis, obviously of a very
different nature than the secession crisis you had in the 1860s. But the
dynamics, the political and partisan dynamics of this, are remarkably
similar.
The Bloc Quebecois is equivalent to your Southern secessionists, Southern
Democrats, states rights activists. The Bloc Quebecois, its 44 seats, come
entirely from the province of Quebec. But even more strikingly, they come from
ridings, or election districts, almost entirely populated by the descendants of
the original European French settlers.
The Liberal party has 26 seats in Quebec. Most of these come from areas where
there are heavy concentrations of English, aboriginal or ethnic votes. So the
Bloc Quebecois is very much an ethnic party, but it's also a secession
party.
In the referendum two years ago, the secessionists won 49 per cent of the
vote, 49.5 per cent. So this is a very real crisis. We're looking at another
referendum before the turn of the century.
The Progressive Conservative party is very much comparable to the Whigs of
the 1850s and 1860s. What is happening to them is very similar to the Whigs. A
moderate conservative party, increasingly under stress because of the secession
movement, on the one hand, and the reaction to that movement from harder line
English Canadians on the other hand.
You may recall that the Whigs, in their dying days, went through a series of
metamorphoses. They ended up as what was called the Unionist movement that won
some of the border states in your 1860 election.
If you look at the surviving PC support, it's very much concentrated in
Atlantic Canada, in the provinces to the east of Quebec. These are very much
equivalent to the United States border states. They're weak economically. They
have very grim prospects if Quebec separates. These people want a solution at
almost any cost. And some of the solutions they propose would be exactly
that.
They also have a small percentage of seats in Quebec. These are
French-speaking areas that are also more moderate and very concerned about what
would happen in a secession crisis.
The Liberal party is very much your northern Democrat, or mainstream
Democratic party, a party that is less concessionary to the secessionists than
the PCs, but still somewhat concessionary. And they still occupy the mainstream
of public opinion in Ontario, which is the big and powerful province,
politically and economically, alongside Quebec.
The Reform party is very much a modern manifestation of the Republican
movement in Western Canada; the U.S. Republicans started in the western United
States. The Reform Party is very resistant to the agenda and the demands of the
secessionists, and on a very deep philosophical level.
The goal of the secessionists is to transform our country into two nations,
either into two explicitly sovereign countries, or in the case of weaker
separatists, into some kind of federation of two equal partners.
The Reform party opposes this on all kinds of grounds, but most important,
Reformers are highly resistant philosophically to the idea that we will have an
open, modern, multi-ethnic society on one side of the line, and the other
society will run on some set of ethnic-special-status principles. This is
completely unacceptable, particularly to philosophical conservatives in the
Reform party.
The Reform party's strength comes almost entirely from the West. It's become
the dominant political force in Western Canada. And it is getting a substantial
vote in Ontario. Twenty per cent of the vote in the last two elections. But it
has not yet broken through in terms of the number of seats won in Ontario.
This is a very real political spectrum, lining up from the Bloc to reform.
You may notice I didn't mention the New Democratic Party. The NDP obviously
can't be compared to anything pre-Civil War. But the NDP is not an important
player on this issue. Its views are somewhere between the liberals and
conservatives. Its main concern, of course, is simply the left-wing agenda to
basically disintegrate our society in all kinds of spectrums. So it really
doesn't fit in.
But I don't use this comparison of the pre-Civil War lightly. Preston
Manning, the leader of the Reform party has spent a lot of time reading about
pre-Civil War politics. He compares the Reform party himself to the Republican
party of that period. He is very well-read on Abraham Lincoln and a keen
follower and admirer of Lincoln.
I know Mr. Manning very well. I would say that next to his own father, who is
a prominent Western Canadian politician, Abraham Lincoln has probably had more
effect on Mr. Manning's political philosophy than any individual politician.
Obviously, the issue here is not slavery, but the appeasement of ethnic
nationalism. For years, we've had this Quebec separatist movement. For years, we
elected Quebec prime ministers to deal with that, Quebec prime ministers who
were committed federalists who would lead us out of the wilderness. For years,
we have given concessions of various kinds of the province of Quebec, political
and economic, to make them happier.
This has not worked. The sovereignty movement has continued to rise in
prominence. And its demands have continued to increase. It began to hit the wall
when what are called the soft separatists and the conventional political
establishment got together to put in the constitution something called "a
distinct society clause.'' Nobody really knows what it would mean, but it would
give the Supreme Court, where Quebec would have a tremendous role in
appointment, the power to interpret Quebec's special needs and powers, undefined
elsewhere.
This has led to a firewall of resistance across the country. It fuelled the
growth of the Reform party. I should even say that the early concessionary
people, like Pierre Trudeau, have come out against this. So there's even now an
element of the Quebec federalists themselves who will no longer accept this.
So you see the syndrome we're in. The separatists continue to make demands.
They're a powerful force. They continue to have the bulk of the Canadian
political establishment on their side. The two traditional parties, the Liberals
and PCs, are both led by Quebecers who favour concessionary strategies. The
Reform party is a bastion of resistance to this tendency.
To give you an idea of how divided the country is, not just in Quebec but how
divided the country is outside Quebec on this, we had a phenomenon five years
ago. This is a real phenomenon; I don't know how much you heard about it.
The establishment came down with a constitutional package which they put to a
national referendum. The package included distinct society status for Quebec and
some other changes, including some that would just horrify you, putting
universal Medicare in our constitution, and feminist rights, and a whole bunch
of other things.
What was significant about this was that this constitutional proposal was
supported by the entire Canadian political establishment. By all of the major
media. By the three largest traditional parties, the PC, Liberal party and NDP.
At the time, the Bloc and Reform were very small.
It was supported by big business, very vocally by all of the major CEOs of
the country. The leading labour unions all supported it. Complete consensus. And
most academics.
And it was defeated. It literally lost the national referendum against a
rag-tag opposition consisting of a few dissident conservatives and a few
dissident socialists.
This gives you some idea of the split that's taking place in the country.
Canada is, however, a troubled country politically, not socially. This is a
country that we like to say works in practice but not in theory.
You can walk around this country without running across very many of these
political controversies.
I'll end there and take any of your questions. But let me conclude by saying,
good luck in your own battles. Let me just remind you of something that's been
talked about here. As long as there are exams, there will always be prayer in
schools.
