Canada’s election: The control freak versus the snob

Canada is facing its fourth parliamentary election in seven years—but this one is different, said Michael Harris in the Ottawa Sun. “For the first time in history,” a sitting government has been found in contempt of Parliament. Opposition parties banded together to vote out the Conservative government of Prime Minister Stephen Harper last week after a report showed that it had lied to Parliament about how much it was paying to purchase F-35 fighter jets from Lockheed Martin. Almost as bad as this scandal and other recent lobbying and campaign financing missteps is the way Harper tries to downplay them. “How appropriate is it for a PM to say, ‘You win some, you lose some,’ when the Federal Court of Appeal makes a legal finding that his party has broken the law?”

No doubt, Harper is a consummate political player, said Stephen Lautens in the Calgary Sun. He has been skillfully “working the system” to govern from a minority position, since the Conservatives have only 143 seats in the 308-seat House of Commons and the opposition is split among the center-left Liberals, the separatist Bloc Québécois, and the leftist New Democrats. Yet while I “admire the skill in the abstract,” I am concerned by Harper’s “systematic abuse of Canadian democratic institutions.” He fired longtime civil servants merely because they “wouldn’t play politics,” but refused to suspend his underlings when they were accused of forging campaign finance documents.

All my intellectual friends hate Harper “with a loathing that other people reserve for Mussolini or Qaddafi,” said Margaret Wente in the Toronto Globe and Mail. But I don’t think he’s that bad. And that’s just as well, since this new election will almost certainly return him to office—he may even pick up enough seats to have an outright majority. The economy is the main issue on voters’ minds, and it’s actually perking up right now. Perhaps more important, nobody out there in the Canadian heartland really likes Harper’s main rival, Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff. They see him as a snob who is too professorial for average Canadians.

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That stereotype of the Liberal leader reveals the worst side of Canadian character, said The Globe and Mail in an editorial. Ignatieff entered politics only recently, “after a distinguished career as a human-rights theorist, writer, and academic.” Once a professor at Cambridge and Harvard, he has written for The New Yorker and hosted programs for the BBC. These achievements should win him respect. But this country has “an unfortunate national prejudice that views success abroad with suspicion or, in its extreme form, contempt.” The Conservatives are actually running ads with the slogan “Ignatieff: He didn’t come back for you.” Such a campaign is ugly—and unworthy of us. Fine, we’ll hear Ignatieff out, said Michael Den Tandt in the Toronto Sun. But he has yet to “articulate a decent reason” for wanting to lead. That Harper “is not a nice man” is surely “not a good enough reason to change governments.”