Canada Votes

Eduardo del Buey
Photo: Reuters
La Jornada Maya

Wednesday, October 23, 2019

In 1937, U.S. writer Gertrude Stein said about her childhood home, “there is no there there”.

That is much the way that I feel about the 2019 federal election campaign in Canada that ended with voters going to the polls on October 21st and re-electing Liberal leader Justin Trudeau.

However, Prime Minister Trudeau will lead a minority government and will depend on the support of one of the other parties in order to govern. The logical partner would be the social democratic New Democratic Party, although he will craft alliances with different parties to address different issues.

This is good, since the Liberals only received less than one-third of the vote, leaving other parties with millions of votes but with fewer members of Parliament than their vote level would indicate. In the 2015 campaign, Trudeau promised to end the first past the post system and introduce legislation to craft some form of proportional representation to give each vote equal weight. He reneged on this promise and the result is, once again, lopsided representation in the House of Commons.

Many voters told journalists towards the end of the campaign that they were surprised that neither major leader – Justin Trudeau for the Liberals and Andrew Scheer for the Conservatives – managed to capture the imagination of voters. Indeed, both leaders dropped in popularity during the campaign and ended less popular than they had appeared during the summer.

Leaders of two of the smaller parties (the social democratic New Democratic Party and the separatist Bloc Quebecois) – both of whose political doom had been forecast at the beginning of the campaign – surprised everyone with very strong performances by their respective leaders and ended up with a better than expected presence in Parliament on Election Day.

I have always believed that politics are about leadership, and election campaigns are about setting out a vision about where each candidate wants to take the country. I have often been let down by the behavior of candidates in most elections, and the candidates in this election did nothing to free me of this perception.

There are major challenges facing Canada and the world.

One of these challenges is climate change.

Environmental activist Greta Thunberg visited Canada during the campaign and participated in the major climate march in Montreal. She has galvanized global opinion in favor of a solution to climate change now. She has motivated the millennials to march worldwide and demand changes that will ensure the survival of the world that they will inherit. And, yes, she met Liberal leader Justin Trudeau and told him that he had not done enough on this issue.

How do Canadians square the circle of the need for fossil fuels in our current and transitional economy towards a green one and the major changes in human behavior required to achieve this change successfully? To be sure, leaders must take positions that balance environmental stewardship with promoting a sound economic bases to ensure that environmental decisions don’t result in massive unemployment and economic stagnation.

Another challenge is the threat that artificial intelligence poses for jobs in many key industries and the effects that this will have on Canadians. We face the possibility of job losses throughout the economy, and the impact will be felt at all levels of society starting with the education system as schools and universities are forced to quickly gear up to educating for a radical new economy.

Yet I heard little mention of European Parliament’s Mady Delvaux excellent proposal that each machine that replaces a worker be assessed income tax on the income that it produces to offset the cost of retraining workers to meet the financial demands of this new economy.

Thirdly, governments face a potential loss of fiscal control given the impact and growth of digital currencies in today’s economy. This may have serious implications for crime prevention and money laundering, investments in the national and global economies, and global stability. The challenges that digitized currencies pose for national sovereignty will require significant discussion and possibly a change in mentalities since the result may well be a struggle between countries for fiscal primacy and economic control.

A fourth challenge is the proliferation of “fake news” on-line as well as election interference on a global level. Major on-line service providers must take steps to ensure that on-line information is truthful and does not represent a threat to the fundamentals of our political or economic system. Governments must ensure that electoral processes are defended from on-line interference, be it at the ballot box or through false information related to political campaigns. I did not hear any candidate discuss plans for addressing or regulating this threat to the integrity of our democratic system.

A fifth challenge is the resurgence of populism round the world along with the radical and violent nationalism and increasing levels of violence that this entails, the weakening of democratic institutions in many countries, and the demise of a multilateral system that has ensured relative peace and prosperity for seven decades.

Foreign policy was largely absent in this campaign at a time when the world is undergoing tectonic shifts everywhere. Canada currently has poor relations with Russia, India, and China, no relations at all with Iran, (a major player in the Middle East).

Canada has played a leading role in the Lima Group, a group of hemispheric countries determined to support Venezuelan leader of the democratically elected Congress Juan Guaido whom they recognize as the legitimate president of the country against Nicolas Maduro the governing president. Despite this support, Maduro’s government was elected to the United nations Human Rights Council last week with the support of the one hundred and twenty-five-member strong Non-Aligned Movement.

Venezuela joins other human rights champions like China, Cuba, and Saudi Arabia. Yet this issue did not come up, and no leader spoke to Canada´s role in the hemisphere or at the United Nations in a year when Canada is running a tough battle for a seat on the Security Council. Indeed, no leader offered a vision as to how Canada can address current global challenges and defend Canada’s interests. While elections are never won or lost on foreign policy, Canada has a role to play in a globalized world and what happens elsewhere has an impact on Canadian security and jobs.

In both debates, significant discussions about trade and foreign policy were absent, despite Canada’s global role as a significant middle power. With an isolationist in the White House, the deterioration of the global security and trade situations are vital issues for Canadians.

While U.S. relations were discussed superficially, no leader offered any vision as to where this relationship is going or how they would plan to deal with the current resident of the White House.

Perhaps this was a wise decision given President Trump’s well-known allergy towards criticism and the need to both stroke his ego and not give the Democrat controlled Congress any reason to decide to not ratify the new trilateral free trade agreement.

Canada has traditionally been an active player in supporting democratic checks and balances, as well as a vocal advocate of fundamental human rights.

All candidates refused to intervene to force the Quebec government to rescind its recent law banning the use of religious symbols used by civil servants including teachers (seen by many as an anti-Muslim policy aimed at encouraging racism among the majority of Quebecers).

Indeed, at the end of the leaders’ French language debate, separatist Bloc Quebecois leader exhorted Quebecers to vote for the candidates who look most like them – a slight perhaps to New Democratic Party leader Jaghmeet Singh who is a turban wearing Sikh-Canadian or in support of the ban on religious garb by civil servants.

And yet, despite these and other major challenges facing Canadians, much energy was spent during the campaign discussing Trudeau’s use of blackface twenty years ago and Andrew Scheer’s loyalty given his dual citizenship and his lying about being an insurance broker in a past life.

These issues are important to many voters seeking leaders whom they can trust. This is especially true in the case of Justin Trudeau who campaigned in 2015 as a different kind of politician and Andrew Scheer who sought to paint himself as an honest alternative to the now tarnished Trudeau. Both campaigns used negative tactics and both leaders have not been true to their word on occasion.

Leadership is not only campaigning to seek high office.

It is setting out a vision of the country towards which each candidate will work, and that creates the kind of consensus that appeals to a majority of voters. Leadership is creating a broad consensus to encourage a majority of voters to commit to a vision and actively address the challenges at hand, even if this means accepting short term pain for long term gain.

Yet, most observers agreed that this was a particularly nasty campaign and deplored the fact that U.S. style politics appears to be making headway in Canada. I would hope that Canadian political leaders would listen to the opprobrium that Canadian voters have for this type of negative campaigning and pursue a more civilized dialogue both while in campaign and between elections.

So, what how will Prime Minister Trudeau govern?

The support of the New Democratic Party will come at a price, and that price will be negotiated over the next few weeks and months as the Liberal government plans its legislative agenda in. consultation with its new partner.

However, Trudeau will be able to tack with either the New Democrats or the Conservatives depending on the issue.

On the main issue of concern to Mexican readers, their main foreign policy concern with respect to the outcome of the Canadian election is the recently agreed Canada-U.S.-Mexico Free Trade Deal that has yet to be ratified by both the United States and Canada.

While the New Democrats called for changes to the environmental and labor aspects of the deal, chances are good that the Conservative Party and Bloc Quebecois would vote with the Government to ratify the deal.

And that is the basis for governing with a minority – negotiating consensus with other parties on key issues to achieve positive results for Canadians.

[i]Mérida, Yucatán[/i]
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