About Canada's Election Results: A Perspective

The January 26 election is going to be seen from the perspective of 25 years out as a historic hinge vote in terms of the Canada that becomes as a result.

I waited a week to venture an opinion because I was having trouble getting a signal out of the noise confusion of the results.

As Bill Belliveau noted in his Blog Insight, a mere change in 10 seats in Quebec moved the fulcrum of Canada's electoral politics from Centre Quebec west of Montreal to center east of Downtown Calgary's petroleum club chubbies. Au Contraire weighed in with his analysis from Downtown Quebec, where all is well.

The era that I and my fellow boomers grew up in as conscious voters watching national election results and the epic era of Pierre Trudeau are now laid to rest. At least for Atlantic Canadians.

It is a new era dawning in Federalism politics that may mean the loss of the capital F and in its place the small f emphasis of a financial clearing house or provincial financial network, rather than a strong centralist government with funded programs looking out for the weakest and tackling the strongest to share good fortune and minimize mis-fortune of geography in Canada.

I was in Ottawa as an association lobbyist during the creation of Trudeau famous and reviled in Western Canada, National Energy Policy. It was a traditional Liberalism and pan Canadian program that was meant to tax the lift Alberta would enjoy from newfound resources riches and allow for this lift to be spread among other Provinces with less natural advantage from geographic accidents.

Canada as a country is a federalism of accidents trying to be a country when the natural magnetic of markets runs north and south. It was a perverse Canadian idea to run a railroad east to west and declare it a sovereign country without and economy to prop it up. Hence our dependence on US markets and investments.

During much of the mid 70's, I ran a newly minted, national federation of local community newspaper ( once called weeklies ) association with an office in Toronto and Ottawa at the time. I would say on the rubber chicken circuit that I had all the problems of Pierre Trudeau with none of the powers of a Prime Minister in keeping my freshly cast, national federation united enough to pay my salary.

The Provincial Associations had all the money and liked it that way. National programs had to be negotiated with each association and all retained the right to opt out. Wait for Harper's first meeting with the rambunctious and independently minded Provincial Premiers and you will hear a lot more about a new version of participatory federalism. It was not what Trudeau who coined the phrase had in mind.

The context for me as a beleaguered federalist was that a short few years before the oldest national newspaper association in Canada had failed as a national body as provincial associations found that members would pay to belong to something that represented their more immediate and geographic interests, but had little stomach for paying national dues for something that appeared so far away, and of questionable relevance.

Other than retaining a federal subsidy on their mailing rates for their out of community subscriptions, who needed to be involved with the rest of Canada. Quebec thank you very much in 1977 was clearly on its own and would send an observer to shrug at entreaties to participate in any national program. It would be implemented with a French name and on their own schedule.

It is where I think we are headed in Quebec City and in Edmonton-Vancouver, if not Regina.

There is a message in there from my exposure to regional fractions for what I see happening now as a result of the January 23 vote.

It is the age of the bully at grade school and in Ottawa. There is going to be a lot of bullying in Canada that will have no effective referee because of the commitments made by the new Conservative Party to hold its natural voter constituency together.

We need to recall basic politic science course 101 on what it means to be of conservative philosophy as a voter and of liberal persuasion as a choice in how one is governed and by what means one hopes their neighbours and competitors are governed.

To be a conservative is to believe that there is a natural progression, if not an evolutionary model of economic growth that if you keep obstacles out of the way, the natural forces of market economics will lift all boats .....eventually. They hold dear the perspective that if left alone the poor among us will be reduced as lower taxation frees up more capital in the marketplace to invest in more things that bring higher yields in terms of dividends that can be further invested and perhaps spent on consumables that generate a growing and expanding economy.

Somewhere in there a consumption tax bring government revenues to spend on minimalist programs and jobs are created by expanding entrepreneurial investments. A sort of hands off the till form of government.

To read the sparse recent Conservative Party program of change and tax reduction promises, it is key to note that there will be a delay of six months in taxing a capital gain from an investment if it is further re-invested. There will be a reduction on the tax levied as the GST/HST burden on purchasing a new Porche, loaded SUV, or a glass plasma wall hanging TV of life size dimensions.

Since the poor consume less plasma TVs at a premium they get an advantage of paying less tax on smaller purchase items like clothing and non-food essentials such as home heating oil and gasoline.

Note the express bias of that comment. There is a rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer concept expressed there. Well as social activist Jesus apparently said in between ducking lynchings, poisonings, ethnic cleansing campaigns and being a poster child for crucification; the poor will always be among you. Apologies to St. James interpreters if I got the quote wrong, but the idea is the same. Poor people are part of the territory and apparently unavoidable. Perhaps the problem can never be solved. Liberals and their liberal on steroids brethren in the NDP believe that poverty is a war to be fought and someday won, if only the rich did not hold all the lever of power to protect their economic turf and dividends.

The irony that this election was lost on a RCMP confirmation letter for a complaint that some potential Liberal insiders inside the finance ministry tipped off their blood money relatives on Wall/Bay Street for insider trading that spooked the RCMP into tipping an election results is an irony that is not lost on me.

Talk about being hoisted on your own petard indeed.

Now, Liberals- large and small L, believe and are convinced that there needs to be human intervention to assist the challenged divine intervention to relieve social conditions. They hold that if the market place is left to decide the number of those becoming rich and getting rich, the natural result of market economics will grow rich in lower numbers than those who start poor and continue to be poor in greater numbers. They postulate that the growing poor class will perhaps be joined in this financial purgatory by some of those cast out of the natural selection club of the rich and richer as the natural market contracts and shrinks from seasonal market conditions.

The original dream of UIC was not lay abouts and seasonal fish workers in Atlantic Canada using it as a strategic weapon of self employment and survival, but as a cushion to prevent social upheaval and slow the spread of those getting poorer as a condition as a result of some market shift. Canada has turned UI into a social instrument of keeping the poor from rioting aka Palestine or Iraq.

So Liberals live to fashion government intervention, create programs that tax the growth of capital appreciation for the sake of appreciation and re-distribute that revenue stream into programs that elevate individuals in the direct opposite of conservatives who assume that a rising tide of economic growth will lift everyone's boat. However it is liberal Liberals who hold that damming the stream of money and creating a pool is a better way to make sure that everyone, whether they realize it or appreciate it or not, are elevated in terms of their quality of life.

Now this amateur explanation of random economics and political party adherents and persuasion is not meant to be accurate in a James Frey publishing world of ethical truths; this is just what I recall in my political memoirs of what I leaned in university political science. I majored in sociology and had to promise my profs on graduation that I would never attempt to teach or practice any course that I had taken. It shows here.

Now back to Harper and this election and the shifting of the fulcrum of political balance in Canada.

Quebec has the balance of political seat power to call the nest election on their timetable and everything to lose if they do so. Harper's promise to transfer Federal tax dollars to Provinces in an orgy of devolving centralist government strength is also the same complaint of Alberta's Have-A-Lot province of natural resources wishes. If Alberta has poor to feed, they will do it their own way and by the way anyone not working has to be of weak character as there are jobs going begging in the bush.

So if you are begging in Calgary, Winnipeg, Toronto or Moncton, best you get to the bush and work. New Brunswick's reality is that the population is quietly doing just that even as we speak.

Frank McKenna, once said several times in various ways as he dealt with his own disillusionment of his own time in office as Premier that he could have done far more, achieved far greater goals for himself and this Province that he somewhat perversely loves; if only he had oil revenues to re-distribute within the competing government departments along King and Queen Streets in Fredericton.

He even once mused as several of us who muse on such things with some kind of macabre fascination with the self destruction of New Brunswick's economy from high energy and low resource commodity prices globally, that staking us a car plant here would have changed the outcome of the Maritimes. It would not matter whether it was in Truro, Moncton or Edmunston, it would have changed the economic future of the Maritimes for a time while the cod, lobster, iron ore, softwood lumber and pulp fiber all peter out.

It is the same of Canada.

Ontario, once a power house of 1 in 6 jobs coming from the creation of the Auto Pact in the 1960's Pearson Liberal's economic development plan for Canada, where Pearson got the appreciative Americans to agree to a formula that allowed Canadian made cars to enter the US for sale as US products on a formula that did not penalize US companies from investing in Canada, made Ontario rich for about 50 years. The Auto Pact is trying to be retained, as it was only a 50 year plan, but when Ford, a staple in Ontario communities across the magnificent subdivisions of southern Ontario that have rendered the former agrarian landscape into endless rows of matchboxes, says it is shedding 30,000 employees; the end is near for economic growth from car plants.

And we still never got one, except for adding North American bumperettes to Made in Sweden Volvos in Halifax for awhile until they got the hang of energy absorbing bumpers to meet US regulations for Canadian assembled cars. We also got to remove the protective wrap off the cars for a while, but even technology has rendered that not a value added premise any longer.

So without a economic linchpin in our economy here in Atlantic Canada, we voted Liberal because we need a federalism that redistributes money to the poorer regions of Canada. A region that has no induced economy for growth from transplanted car plants or from the luck of the geography.

Geographical luck that saw the creation of the Rockies at the time of creation or cosmic boom, depending on your preferred vision of how we amoebas got to drive cars, which accidentally left a fossil fuel dump in the flat land of Alberta and Saskatchewan and perhaps the tundra of the new NWT provinces.

A World economy starving for new oil finds is ploughing money into Alberta, which is coincidently in Canada, at least for a time.

So the election of 2006 is the end of the gig started in Charlottetown with the Confederation concept that was based on every Province sharing its poor as well as its rich resources when found to create a Liberal's dream of an equalized Canada. A vision of Canada where the vagrant in Downtown Toronto, temporarily poor between marriages and drug additions could look forward to lower heating costs and subsidized welfare cheques from the riches found in Alberta and British Columbia. Or if Lobster and alder bushes suddenly become a source for curing cancer.

That dream took a big hit on election night 2006.

Under the reality of the Harper Conservative dream as I interpret it here in barely standing Atlantic Canada, those with natural riches and natural geographic selection of advantage get to keep what they happen to find under ground to fuel their economic development advantages within their territorial boundaries. Like a family on a picnic where the natural children get to have cake and ice cream and those adopted, well you know, its too bad, but you were just not born at the right time and place.

This is the new federalism of Canada, dressed up with nicer language, but no less brutal.

The Calgary-Edmonton view of federalism is one in which much is retained and little is shared, but much is asked.

That Quebec has a similar view of the federalism of the future in which they use their parliamentary dominance to extract even greater rewards, egged on by an appreciative Alberta and now Saskatchewan, which is also balking at being now a Have-Excess-Revenues-Must-Keep-In-Province, will insure that Harper is a successful Prime Minister.

Harper will reshape Canada. It will be in the image of the get out and do it with your pick up icon image of Western Canada and let the marketplace reward the victor.

Atlantic Canada needs to get ready for tough love medicine. My late father, a lifelong Liberal after witnessing a riot in Saint John City by long shoremen, induced by a Conservative Prime Minister during the Great Depression, who said in a speech there that started a deadly riot that it was not up to him to solve their economic problems causing my father that night to switch to being a Liberal; well he would rue this election day. I was profoundly influenced by his view of Liberal and liberal Canada.

Canada previous to last Monday was a dream perpetuated by a myth that we have something unique and valuable in being able to say that we govern an eighth or more of the World's mass from east to west in a contiguous continent tied together by railway lines and bad highways and not much else. So we built a government sponsored and redistributed economy to support that novel vision of nation building.

While it is possible that Atlantic Canada could somehow benefit from this election and the next 25 years. I for the life of me cannot see where the spark and the leadership is coming from. We have some marginal success companies here, but our future lies with New England and the real world tough life of the Yankee traders and marketplace from New Jersey north. If you notice where, outside New Brunswick the Irving's are investing big dollars, it is down the Atlantic Coast. They venture west to pick up the odd stranded asset from a departing US company, like their venerable sanitary products plant in old Toronto.

It is not for anything that they have their own nation building railroad that by default setting and track access runs north south and avoids going east to west. It recognizes that central Canada has never been particularly receptive to eastern Canada.

If you think it is hard to see the easter horizon from Toronto in order to understand what is Atlantic Canada, try it from the tallest floor of an office power center in today's Calgary. If the mountains don't get you on 360 view, the dominant night vision from Calgary's highest elevations are of gas flares flaming into the night. It is there empire to be harvested. It is the source of everything they think and do.

It is their source of economic wealth and growth and they see no reason to share it in order that a starving Lobster fisherman in PEI or the Bay of Fundy facing disappearing stocks of available product to market, should be subsidized in their lifestyle choices by a tax on their oil revenues.

Calgary has more in common with Denver than Moncton and despite the fact that West Jet flies to both locations, the decision makers go to Denver for their marching orders and the grease monkeys and cannon fodder for the war on fossil fuel energy production fly home to visit depleted family members in Moncton and Halifax. Everyone including the Lobster are depleting in Atlantic Canada.

While it sounds bleak, it does not have to be.

I think this is a 25 year cycle- maybe 50 at best. If my granddaughters both under three have to go to the West to get education and jobs with their father working at Mount A, but unable to finance their education in a Maritime Provinces university, even if they can somehow survive depleting financial support from Maritime governments, then Atlantic Canada will be a rump tourist theme park in the future.

Our coastline will be ringed with leisure homes owned by fly in wealth and occasional middle class visitors seeking relief from heat and drug induced gun violence in population centers.

Speaking to Rotary Clubs in 70's Alberta, then feeling poor but with optimism that they were the future of Canada, then, I used to joke that I came from Atlantic Canada and that they should not hold my temporary resident status in Toronto against me. They laughed hesitantly.

Emboldened, I would compliment on their burgeoning wealth in grain, cattle and oil finds. I would explain that I feared that Atlantic Canada was going to be declared a national park from Quebec City east and that all who entered the Park Entrance at Riverie du Loup would know that we had given up on economic development and were simply going to be paid by Ottawa to not pollute further the environment and live simply along pastoral and picturesque parkway highways stretched along the coastlines.

A population with a view and a pledge to not attempt economic diversification in return for a stable transfer program.

There, ( here in Atlantic Canada), I would suggest that we would practice our way of Maritime life, buying Lottery tickets and having all you can eat fish fests for the day when the rich of central and western Canada needed a place to visit for an economical summer vacation to see the way Canada started some 138 years ago. The audiences would love the wit and image of it in Drummheller's Rotary Club and laughed warmly.

We were not a threat as a region and everyone loved to hate Toronto and by extension Ottawa. Trudeau's National Energy Program made that visceral and remains to this day as a reason that the West wants in as we have heard ad nauseum in the run off for this election.

So what do I think of Monday lasts election. I do not think it a disaster. I think it is the natural order of things in Canada and that electoral politics has finally caught up with the reality in Canada.

The future is where our addiction to oil is best found. If there was any doubt, then the CBS 60 Minutes program of last Sunday night, shown on the evening prior to Canada's election, confirmed that Western Canada is in global ascent. Even all over the United States who envies us in Canada over our tar sands reserves and habitually refers to Alberta as the giant elephant in the room at meetings of US oil and gas associations.

And now the West has their own Prime Minister with an agenda for creating a made in Alberta vision of fiscal and social conservatism that oddly enough will play to the conservative and independentist minded Quebecers as these two power brokers play out the march to Canada of 2050.

Which leads us to the future of Frank McKenna and whether he could or even should try to turn this around by changing the fortunes and future of the once fabled Liberal Party, as the natural governing party of Canada. This is a brand image destroyed if ever there was one.

My advice to Frank McKenna, the largest political news story of January 2006, overshadowing even the election results with his Globe and Mail instant status as a contender in a hopeless contest in my mind is simple. Come home Frank.

Come home and help lead this region with an activist Atlantic Development Fund that invests in our own and seeks markets primarily in the northeast US, or wherever we can find them. Perhaps we need our own shared provincial network with a central investment bank to bring capital investment into what we can get going here.

Come home Frank and counsel your family owned manufacturing firm on how to best access US markets for the value added kitchen cabinets made in humble Shediac, where the Lobster is already slipping into history and historically low stocks in the Strait spell a cod fish ending for Northumberland Strait lobster processors. I really think that Frank should avoid the siren call of the ships of State, as a modern day political Hercules and work to expand his potential to employ Atlantic Canadians.

Lead by example and help teach Atlantic based firms how to build an economic future of independence.

We need to acknowledge the change in Canada's future where the conservative view of minimal intervention in market forces is in accent. We need to invest and build with domestic Atlantic pension funds in ourselves.

We need leadership in Atlantic Canada.

Our chances are slim of defeating a new wave of every Province for itself in Canada, aided and abetted by the legislative agenda of a Harper government to transfer funds and funding power to the Provinces with opt in and out federalism means we are on our own here.

Read the entrails of the Federal Liberal Party apparatus and their eat their own young mentality means that Frank will first have to renovate the party and then turn his attention on a youthful looking corporate sounding CEO in Harper. While Frank at my age of contemplated future approaching 60, has his best image high jacked by a sitting, minority Prime Minister Harper.

A couple of sacrificial and optical cabinet ministers from Atlantic Canadian ridings is not going to stem this tide. Canada of 2050 will look nothing like Canada of 2005 in terms of a sovereign and interventionist, liberal minded government building a unique vision of Canadianism.

If our internal bickering does not get us, globalization will as raw resources are shipped to lowest cost production points and back again as consumables in a North America that produces knowledge, but little else, once the oil runs out.

So, my advice is for McKenna to come home and find a cabal of like minded entrepreneurs and we will sell ourselves out of this situation. The old Liberal Liberalism of regional equality and resource sharing is so 1965.

We need to live and breath a regionalism with New England and the central US marketplace as a producer of IT related products, value added consumables like the Irving's are producing with fiber and the new clothing fiber from wood fiber in Nackawic and Atholville and build an airline based tourism traffic between the US and eastern Maine and Canada for our economic growth.

Anything we get from the rest of Canada will be accidental, in my opinion. Since this narrative will exist in some form until the server eats its hard drive, we will see how wrong or right this missive of analysis on the 2006 election is, or not, some years out.

For now, I salute the excitement I felt under the leadership of Trudeau and McKenna, and accept that I may never feel this excited about politics, potential, policy or a performing economy again.

We are on our own in Atlantic Canada.