Election drama unfolds to north

We must not let a preoccupation with our drawn-out presidential election make us overlook the drama unfolding to the north. Canadians will head to the polls on Monday to elect their new Parliament. Since Canada’s government, namely the prime minister and cabinet, comes from the largest party in Parliament, this election will decide who controls the federal government for the next four years or so without a separation of powers or checks and balances to complicate their lives.

Canada currently has a five-party Parliament. The middle-road Liberals hold a majority of seats and form the government. The Western-based socially and economically right-wing Canadian Alliance occupies second place. With it comes Official Opposition status. Third is the sovereigntist Bloc Quebecois, which runs candidates only in Quebec. The leftist New Democrats and the mildly right-wing Progressive Conservatives also hold parliamentary seats, but they have limited support.

Prime Minister Jean Chretien has the power to choose the election date anytime up to five years after the preceding election. He’s heading to the people now even though the last election was in June 1997. Prime ministers usually wait four years. Why go now? Chretien likes his job and he wants to keep it. He had favorable poll numbers early this fall and he just delivered a $1.4 billion five-year income tax cut. If the prime minister and his government enjoy high popularity, especially when people are feeling good about the economy and their personal situation, why put off an election until the government’s standing worsens? The latest polls suggest that Chretien and the Liberals may be cruising toward a third government with the majority of parliamentary seats that lets them carry out almost any policies they wish.

Even so, public opinion can shift quickly. The prime minister’s personal popularity has been falling steadily during the campaign. His performance in the French and English-language party leaders’ debates three weeks ago – there’s only one of each – was unimpressive. Chretien seems to offer no convincing reason for the early election call, apart from pure opportunism. At 66 and after seven years as prime minister – and 37 years in federal politics – the prime minister is gaining the reputation of a politician who’s been around too long and has little more to offer. So why, after all this, does he seem to be heading for an easy reelection?

The alternative makes many Canadians uneasy. Stockwell Day of Alberta leads the Canadian Alliance. Day is a born-again Pentecostal with social and economic views associated with the religious right. He believes life begins at conception, he supports creationism over Darwinian evolution, he opposes “special rights” for gays and aboriginals, he endorses national referenda on “hot-button” social issues, and he wants less government – especially in Ottawa – with sharply lower income taxes. But no more than 15 percent of Canadians are evangelicals.

Most Canadians tell pollsters they support abortion rights and don’t want the issue reopened or subjected to a divisive referendum. They also want to keep their taxpayer-supported social programs. So far Chretien has convinced many Canadians, especially in all-important Ontario, that Day’s views are risky and extreme, and that they reveal a hidden agenda which is more American than Canadian.

Above all, Chretien is portraying Day as a threat to Canada’s all-inclusive medical care and its “caring and sharing” society. Some prominent Alliance members have endorsed so-called “two-tiered” medicine like in Britain, where private fee-for-service clinics coexist with government-funded hospitals. Canada bans this arrangement as a denial of equal access. Day protests that he supports public medicare, and opposes two-tier and private medicine. Chretien also attacks the Alliance for opposing regional development assistance for disadvantaged “have-not” regions like the Atlantic provinces. An Alliance government would cancel the Liberals’ recent $700 million Atlantic Initiative to encourage investment and job creation in the chronically high-unemployment region.

The Alliance favors moving people to jobs in fast-growing areas. It considers transfers like the Atlantic Initiative a waste of taxpayers’ money and an inefficient and fruitless attempt to counteract market forces.

Does Canada’s election matter to us in Maine? Most Americans wouldn’t notice much change under an Alliance government. Both the Liberals and Alliance fully recognize the need to encourage trade and investment. Now that the United States supplies 86 percent of Canada’s trade, both imports and exports, and now that 45 percent of Canada’s gross domestic product relies on foreign trade – the highest figure in the world and four times our own trade reliance – Canada’s government of whatever stripe must keep the country wide open for trade and investment. It’s truer than ever that, as a politician put it in the 1960s, the United States is Canada’s best friend whether Canadians like it or not.

On the other hand, the Liberals’ Atlantic Initiative and other regional transfers might make Atlantic Canada more attractive to Americans than the Alliance’s policies that benefit wealthier regions. If we want to develop closer trade and investment relations with our Atlantic neighbors, we probably will benefit from a Liberal government that keeps people and money next door rather than relocating them towards the West.

One final observation. Canada’s election aftermath will lack the drawn-out drama and controversy of our own ordeal earlier this month. The federal election rules are made in Ottawa for the whole country. Canada’s ballots have no chads, hanging or otherwise. There are not exit polls or premature calls. We’ll have virtually all results by midnight Monday our time. Nonpartisan judges, not elected or partisan politicians, will conduct and certify any recounts. All in all, Canadians think they run elections better than we do.

How can we disagree?

Howard Cody is an associate professor of Political Science and Canadian Studies at the University of Maine in Orono.