Publius cuts through the Imperial Capital (T.O. that be) crap:
…Where most of the key media outlets are located, downtown Toronto, is certainly a centre-left kind of place…
…With the exception of cottage country the WASPs who rule the Toronto media, and they are still mostly WASPs, have little knowledge of Canada beyond the city limits. Their grandparents might have come from Truro but their eyes are fixed on New York, London and Shanghai. They don’t reflect Canada to Canadians. They reflect themselves to Canadians…
If the issue was put plainly to Canadians, removed from our national obsession with the United States, I doubt the defenders of Medicare would have much of a chance. But no one has put that issue plainly to Canadians, at least with the advantage of a national audience…
How is Canada a centre-left country? Because our political, educational and media elite tell us we are so. The pre-Pearson Canada was not a vast commune. The runner-up at the 1968 Liberal Party convention, Robert Winters, was to the Right of Stephen Harper today…
Heck, read it all–and the “Comments”.
I have often thought that the rest of Ontario would be much better off if only we could make Toronto a separate province of it’s own.
The rest of us could then get on with building a new province along the lines of Alberta and Saskatchewan. Toronto could get on with believing their own media’s lies. Dufus McGoofy could be Premier of the Province of Toronto for life.
And they could take their own debt with them while they were at it.
I’ll second that Frank Q, I’m originally from Kitchener…
Politicaly Canada is becoming balkanized more than people are willing to admit. It is not some homogenous multi-cult nation that they, the media, try to convince us exists.
Eventually Canada will split up. Other than the fact they speak english the maritimes has nothing in common with Alberta politicaly. Quebec might as well be a seperate country and sometimes I wish it was.
If our constitution granted the provinces more sovereign rights or even an elected senate there might be some hope of it staying together but that will never happen.
“I have often thought that the rest of Ontario would be much better off if only we could make Toronto a separate province of it’s own. ”
Add Ottawa to that,and I can QUARENTEE the ROC would be far better off.And Mcgoffy,Can’t do it Stevie,and Muckliar can fight over the name after the Hogtown/Swilltown bums merge with the Queebecers.
I second that, Q & Joe
I always thought it was fascinating that Canada had such a modern socialist agenda. I often wondered how such a mostly rural country had such left leaning tendencies.
Then I look to my own country and see how our left leanings have expanded, even though the majority of the country is conservative. The huge cities hold the trump card for any agenda. The solidly conservative “fly over” states don’t have a chance with all the liberal left packed in the cities.
I was astonished at how left the city of Edmonton is.
The silent conservative majority in the US is now awake. I hope the same groups in Canada are awakening from their slumber as well, before it is too late.
Hmm. Great column by Publius, but I question a few assumptions.
The comment by nomdeblog on Publius’ site is excellent. He points out that ‘a new Ipsos-Reid poll put the CPC and NDP in a statistical tie. Remember also that in our 4-5 party structure, the majority voted for leftist parties (NDP, Liberals, Green, Bloc).
Remember also, Harper won a majority in the 2011 election but it took three elections to get a breakthrough for the CPC in Toronto – three elections of behaving in moderate fashion.
Remember also that our media not merely in Toronto but throughout the nation are predominantly leftist; our schools and universities, our public service bureaucracy – are left.
And as nomdeblog points out on Publius:
“Meanwhile compare the take of Ottawa at 14 % of GDP and going down to 12% in about 3 years. However, the total government take at all 3 levels is about 40% (BTW, that is the same level the USA is moving toward with ObamaCare etc). The stats on the Provincial and municipal take is blowing through the roof.”
Consider the Toronto City Council, which has been steadfastly rejecting the new Mayor Ford’s attempt to privatize some services, reduce the total union hold on the taxpayer’s pocket, reduce costs.
Consider the Quebec students, rioting in Montreal because they consider it their ‘right’ to receive the lowest university tuition in Canada. A ‘right’ sustained only by extensive fiscal input by the Rest of Canada. Oh, and these low tuition rates are available to any and all francophone students from all over the world: from France, Belgium – any international francophone student gets the same low rate. But students from the ROC, heh, must pay more. A lot more. Now – is that leftist or not?
So, an argument that Canada is not a leftist country is a weak argument when we consider that the authority-to-make decisions remains strongly controlled by the left.
It’s changing, slowly, but it is taking time. And we can’t be sure that Canada will move out of its leftist stupor and become a responsible nation.
I posted a rejection of this rejection of this assumption that Canada is not ‘really’ leftist but the filter took it.
I’ll only say – take a look at the Publius comments and read the one by nomdeblog. He’s very shrewd.
Remember, it took Harper three elections, all the time behaving in a moderate ‘no hidden agenda’ fashion, to break through into Toronto. Remember also, that in our 4-5 party system, although the CPC won a majority of seats, the popular vote ratio for the other parties all of whom are left, gave the left the popular majority.
ET I agree with you and point out just how low Canada has sunk.
June 28 2004 the Liberals, caught with their hands in the till – up to their armpits, still garnered enough votes to win minority.
We can blame the media all we like, and they desirve any crap that falls on them, but the voting public are fully to blame.
Tony – exactly. The ideology and infrastructure of Canada remains embedded in the left.
Leftism is essentially an anti-individual, a ‘kept’ society. Think about it. Canada has for most of its life been economically and legislatively ‘kept’ under the protection of other nations. First the UK and then and still, the USA.
Our record of free market economic business enterprises, our record of technological innovation is abysmal. We’ve depended on the US for 85% of our exports which are heavily raw resources; we’ve depended on them for the business franchises which we copy and set up in Canada; we’ve depended on them for almost all of the world’s technological innovations.
That means that as a population we do NOT focus on the independence in thought and economic activity of the individual. We focus only on the end stage of the economic triad: Consumption. Not investment or production. So we focus only on ensuring that everyone consumes the same amount and we are not concerned with how they achieve the money for this consumption.
Harper has been trying to change that – very actively change that, with his attempts to open up trade routes with Asia, with S and C America, with Europe. His reduction of corporate and capital taxes, his focus on skilled rather than endless unskilled immigration, his focus on encouraging small business private enterprise – is all part of an attempt to change this infrastructure.
But the Canadian governing infrastructure is embedded in the left. The immediate economic mood may be caution but the operating infrastructure is left. That includes the powerful public service unions of the govt bureaucracies at the federal and provincial and municipal levels – which feed off the taxpayer at enormous cost. It includes our universities and all education from K-12 with their powerful teachers unions and their leftist ideology of ‘being kept by the govt’.
It includes our media – whether the CBC, CTV or the numerous major and even small newspapers. All left, All anti-Harper, anti-independent entrepreneurs and constantly talking about ‘compassion’ and ‘how we must help’ – whether it’s ads in the subway about Earth Hour or being a vegetarian.
Our provincial and municipal governments remain embedded in this leftist infrastructure. Consider the Montreal demonstrations by students insisting on the lowest (subsidized by the ROC) tuition in Canada – a tuition rate available to ALL international francophones whether from Belgium or France or..but unavailable to students from the rest of Canada.
Consider the infrastructure of municipal govt in Toronto – where the infrastructure is controlled by the left (councillors and unions) even though the people voted in Ford, a fiscal conservative. He’s helpless in that situation.
So – the immediate economic mood may be conservative but the embedded infrastructure is deeply and firmly left.
The Canadian leftist identity is imbedded in the origin of the country. Canada did not throw in with the American fight for Independance, although IMHO we should have. Instead we were left with a monarchy based on top down, central government. The various sectors that make up what was Canada at that time have been co-opted to maintain the status quo.
Again my take has always been that forces in central Canada drew the wealth of the extremities to the center to maintain the status quo. No politcal force outside of Ontario has ever been tolerated as it might challenge. Alberta and Saskatchewan would not be admitted as one province for this reason. To this day that same effort is being made. Unfortunately the center bet their economic future on an industrial base that is sinking. The West grows stronger every year and whether that leads to a breakup is yet unknown.
A fundamental remake of the national direction of Canada will have to be made if it is to survive. The influence peddlers and special interests which camp in Ottawa will have to be run out. A day when being Canadian will mean equality for all and special rights for none will have to occur!
Let us bring some true Canadian reality to the picture and move the nation’s capital to Winnipeg! 🙂
ct- I disagree that the monarchy or the notion of a topdown centralist govt has anything to do with the ideological infrastructure of Canada. I think there are several reasons.
One is the economic and legislative dependency of the emerging nation of Canada as it moved from colonial to self-governing status. That is, for most of the Canadian lifespan it was economically and legislatively dependent on the UK. It was a ‘kept’ society and a ‘kept society’ is always leftist because it rejects individualism.
Second, and vital, is demographics. The settlement of Canada was, until the last generation, focused around Quebec and Ontario. These were the population and economic centres. Why, one generation ago, the population of Canada was, in 1940 only 11 million, in 1950, it was 13 million, and 80% of that was focused in Ontario and Quebec. The rest of the nation was almost irrelevant – and the governing infrastructure reflected that.
Remember that Trudeau maintained this, with his attack on the West’s resources, his Charter which embeds bilingualism into the nation and reduces immigrants to dependent ethnic blocs and denies rights and powers to the individual.
Now, with the rise of the West – and Harper’s CPC is an acknowledgment of this – we are seeing an ideological change. BUT the embedded infrastructure of governance, set up decades ago, still empowers the centralist and leftist ‘kept people’ agenda. This doesn’t disappear rapidly.
Canada has to change economically from being dependent on the US for its primary export site and dependent on the US for technological innovation, to empowering individual free enterprise. It isn’t easy; our infrastructure in the education system rejects this; our infrastructure in governance – the unions, the bureaucracies – reject this at all levels.
But, gradually, the mood is shifting. Even one decade ago, we wouldn’t have heard the arguments against the repressive Human Rights Commissions, we wouldn’t have hostility to the CBC, or seen a SUN TV, or talked about private health care, or getting rid of the Wheat Board..and so on.
[ramble]Socialism allows the rich to keep the money in the family. Its intent is the control of acquisition of political and financial power. Political influence in the left-wing Canadian system depends on friends and connections – merit is irrelevant. If hard work and intelligence were the key to advancement in Ontario the Asian population would be running the country by now.
And I am very tired of this socialist self-interest being disguised as a form of virtue. My impression was that within the Quebec religious system, volunteer work meant washing dishes for homeless people, or cleaning up after children with developmental problems. At the local university here in Ontario, “volunteer work” seems to consist of throwing parties to raise money for “awareness”, or holding bake sales, or going to local schools to “educate” the public. It looks great on CVs. A lot of this is funded with taxpayer money, so the system is self-perpetuating. “Volunteering” in Montreal meant putting on clothes that could get dirty: in my social milieu in Ontario, it means dressing up to the nines. On the other hand, I’m making great contacts, so there’s that.
The insistence on “niceness” by Liberal Ontario is designed to protect the wealthy from information they don’t want to hear. Pointing out that upper class left-wing WASPs are spoiled to the point of being sociopathic is not “nice”, but it is accurate. In private, these people do not even bother pretending to be “nice”.
This was a great post. The only thing I disagreed with was the line: “their eyes are fixed on New York, London and Shanghai”. I’ve actually found a lot of these people to be quite parochial. Immigrants have an international perspective, of course, and many standard-issue middle class Canadians from my own background have spent a lot of time living abroad for work or study purposes. It isn’t uncommon in BC or Alberta to bump into a random white person who speaks some Mandarin/Japanese/Spanish/Arabic, just because their jobs have taken them abroad. Among Ontario’s rich left-wing this would be unusual: interest in other countries seems to be limited to finance, or to gaining social clout through volunteer work. There is no deep interest in how other countries function – probably because they do not understand how their own country functions.
[/ramble]
Whenever i get into discussions (or read them) with conservatives i am troubled by the assertions that so and so ‘is not a real conservative’ or is ‘not conservative enough’. It seems rather silly to me that people who call themselves conservatives assume that everyone else packages their political beliefs in the same fashion. On the contrary, I think most Canadians might view themselves as conservative leaning, or progressive leaning. Thus we want governments that lean left or lean right. We do not want the NDP as it is too far left and we would not re elect Steven Harper if he took a hard right turn now that he is in the majority.
Those who feel betrayed and outraged and disillusioned and so on and so on ought to remember that all of the work done by this government can be undone by the next. It might take years and cause a firestorm to dismantle the CBC, but it will take a week to create a new one when the conservatives are thrown out for being too extreme.
I am conservative by the way, and a libertarian . I describe myself in these terms despite having been told many times by people in these groups that I am neither.
john s – excellent comments. Many thanks.
Texas
Canada is an urban nation. In the last 50 years, it has gone from 67% to over 80% urban, just slightly more urban than the US at 79%. The main differences in the rural economies of the two nations is that the vast component of public lands (mineral, energy, forest resources) in Canada fall under provincial Crown ownership, while in the US, the vast majority of public lands of a nation with considerably more private ownership are federal lands (subject to one of the planet’s worst political and regulatory leviathan). As nomdeblog pointed out, Canada’s federal government is not involved in the big government issues (health care, education, resources) that her provinces are.
Small and large c conservatives in Canada tend to rally behind the “provincialization” of these resources as if to confuse that with free enterprise, private property rights, rule of law, IE, Capitalism. Taking Alberta as an example, it is unquestionably the most “conservative” province in Canada and one where, thanks to the “collective wealth” of the provincially- owned energy resources and as a relatively (historically) business-friendly jurisdiction, become the highest per capita provincial government spender. Thus Alberta has perhaps the largest spoiled public sector and related entitlement expectations from it’s population, not a great environment for “actual” enduring conservative prospects. Alberta’s Red Tories are not much different than BC’s Liberals who aren’t that much different than BC’s NDP.
This subsidiarity does make those jurisdictions more accountable to the province’s voters rather than say the US federal leviathan but it didn’t help Ontario and Quebec (and other failing provinces) where the march of (provincial) statism has eventually dominated.
fridge logic – I think your ramble is an anti-Ontario rant and, might I suggest, not quite accurate.
There are a lot of internationalists in Ontario, people born in Ontario who’ve spent a fair bit of time abroad up to the point of being functional in the language. And there’s no comparison between the volunteer work done by a religious institution in any area, be it Quebec or Ontario, and the ‘volunteer’ work done by students at a university – in any province.
The rich leftwing are quite similar[though hardly sociopathic!] whether from Montreal, Toronto or Vancouver; whether they spend their winters in Florida (in ‘little Quebec’) or California or even, in Turkey.
Most certainly, however, socialism is a tribal system; you get ahead by your kinship contacts rather than merit. That’s valid in Quebec, Ontario and everywhere that a unionized bureaucracy gains control. The focus on individual merit is lost within these systems.
Re “ct”: “Canada did not throw in with the American fight for Independance, although IMHO we should have”: our forebears thought them to be traitors, and they were. Glenn Beck is admirable, but he is wrong about all of the ills of the US coming from moving away from what “the Founders” preached. In fact the present ills come directly from the political immaturity and political fantasies of the US founders. This is particularly so in regard to slavery, which was a very weak point built in to the US constitution. Weak point indeed: it led to an impressive civil war. BNA 1867 came directly out of MacDonald’s observations of the US constitution and the war which it caused. And, of course, the fact that that great war failed to solve the black/white problem, thanks to that accursed race of hatemongering liberals known as Democrats.
I do sometimes think that Canada was quite happy to be a backwater of Great Britain; and since 1945 has maneuvered to become a backwater of the United States hegemony; and I think we are working toward becoming a backwater of India, or perhaps of China.
We are rather clever at this.
But it will be a difficult point; I doubt that we can serve two masters, if the two are indeed India and China.
All ready here on the West Coast we know that the
name of the great river that divides India and China is the Fraser.
John Lewis@4:20pm;
Might I point out that at the time of the Declaration of Independance that Great Britian also had slavery. The critical concern is the Declaration itself and the rights of citizens. Although an assumption by me I have to believe that eventually slavery would have been abolished.
The key point was that the citizen had the right to plot his own direction and not be dictated to by a government not responsible to the people. I will not argue that the British did provide many benefits to their colonies but the monarchy was not one of them.