There’s an old joke that goes: Why did the Canadian cross the road? Answer: to get to the middle of the road. Likewise (so they say) if you cut the average Canadian open you would find two words engraved on his or her heart. One would be “moderate”. The other would be “nice”.
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Prime Minister Stephen Harper, who was four months short of ten years in office when he was swept out of power in Monday’s election, was a moderate right-wing politician, although he pretended to be a hard right one. Six of his ten budgets were in deficit, and he ended up adding $150 billion to Canada’s national debt.
Similarly, the New Democratic Party (NDP) is a very moderate left-wing party by anybody’s standards (except those of Americans) – and Justin Trudeau’s Liberals have always believed that they owned the middle of the road. The 78-day election campaign, which was a tight three-horse race until the last couple of weeks, was not about ideology at all. It was about political style.
Stephen Harper didn’t do “nice”. His default setting was “nasty”, and he positively revelled in it. He was a control freak who instinctively tried to hurt and smear those who disagreed with him, and in his government even the time of day was a state secret. His attack ads against rival politicians were vicious, he was visibly contemptuous of journalists and the opposition parties, and he almost took pride in being disliked.
Yet he stayed at the top of national politics for almost a decade because he actually ran a reasonably effective government that shielded Canadians from the worst effects of the post-2008 recession. His manner was unpleasant, but he was no radical. What finally defeated Harper was the fact that enough Canadians had grown sick of the nastiness that they were willing to vote for whichever party had the best chance of beating him. At the beginning of the election campaign that looked likely to be the NDP, but a typical piece of Harper nastiness took them down.
The great niqab debate was what did the NDP in. Only two Canadian Muslim women have ever insisted on wearing the face-covering during a citizenship ceremony, but the Conservatives turned banning niqabs into a “wedge issue” – and NDP leader Thomas Mulcair said Muslim women should be allowed to wear them.
Eighty percent of Quebecers wanted to ban the niqab, and when Mulcair said he opposed a ban the party’s support there collapsed. A typically nasty piece of political manipulation, but in fact the Conservatives had been too clever. Previously undecided voters whose only objective was getting rid of Harper swung behind the Liberals when they appeared to be the only party that could do the job.
Harper might still be in office today if he had just let the two opposition parties split the anti-Harper vote evenly between them. There are times when nastiness just doesn’t pay. In the end Trudeau won just by being sunny, positive and nice. He talked a great deal about “change”, because that was what the anti-Harper voters wanted to hear, but he didn’t go into much detail.
Trudeau promised a few flagship policy changes to get people’s attention – pulling Canadian warplanes out of Iraq and Syria, slightly higher taxes for the rich and slightly lower taxes for the middle class, maybe legalising marijuana – but his core social and econmic policies aren’t going to be radically different from Harper’s.
He will, however, be much nicer than Stephen Harper.
