Editorial
Is it Possible for the "Right" to Unite?
Although these days it is becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish between parliamentary parties of the "Right" and "Left", there are now three political parties or groupings in parliament which characterize themselves as being on the "Right" - the Canadian Alliance, Progressive Conservatives, and the Alliance dissidents in the Democratic Representative Caucus. This has resulted in a situation in which there is no opposition party in Parliament which has a viable chance of replacing the ruling Liberals. While this has actually been the de facto case for much of the 20th century, with the Liberals being in power for about 80 percent of the time, at this particular time it is causing embarrassment to the ruling elite.
The British parliamentary system was carefully designed to keep the people out of power and the franchise was made universal only after this system had been perfected. It is a system of deception in which two parties representing the ruling classes vie for "power". When the party forming Her Majesty's government discredits itself, Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition is ready and willing to take over and implement the same policies.
As long as the Progressive Conservatives were a national party with at least some hope of getting elected, this fraud could be perpetrated against the electorate. But the PCs were devastated in the 1993 federal election and have failed to recover. The Reform Party emerged in Western Canada and the Bloc Quebecois in Quebec, leaving the PCs a few seats in the Maritimes. When the Reform Party failed to break out of Western Canada in the 1997 federal election, an effort was mounted by Conrad Black, Mike Harris and others to "unite the Right" into a viable opposition party. The result was the Canadian Alliance, an alliance of the Reform Party with some provincial PCs, while the federal Conservative party continued on under the leadership of Joe Clark.
In the 2000 federal election the Alliance again failed to break out of Western Canada to become a national opposition party and it began to come apart at the seams. With the disintegration of the Alliance under Stockwell Day's leadership, the ruling elite is back at square one, with no viable opposition party and a de facto single party state. So it is trying desperately to cobble together another alliance under the Conservatives, preferably without Joe Clark and the "Red Tories" who cling to some aspects of social democratic policies. What the elite wants to achieve is two parties of the "Right" which subscribe to neo-liberalism (i.e., the Liberals and some version of the PCs), so there is a safe party to turn to once the Liberals are discredited with the electorate.
Can such a unity of the "Right" be accomplished in the present conditions? This remains to be seen, but at this time the prospects appear very dim. The vicious infighting within the Canadian Alliance has demonstrated that there are very sharp contradictions within what is called the Right. There are the social conservatives or "religious Right" represented by Stockwell Day. Then there are the fiscal conservatives represented by the Alliance defectors and the PCs (as well as the Liberals, for that matter). Both trends support neo-liberal policies, but there really is no other basis of unity between them and whatever unity they achieved has now been shattered.
But the past few months have demonstrated that there are also very sharp contradictions between those who characterize themselves as fiscal conservatives/social liberals. Those contradictions reflect the deeper economic contradictions between the Eastern monopoly groups and the Alberta oil monopolies. The Eastern capitalists need cheap oil to maximize their profits, while the oil capitalists need expensive oil to maximize their profits.
Those contradictions came to a head when Stephen Harper, the head of the National Citizens Coalition, advocated the construction of an "economic firewall" around Alberta to protect its interests from Eastern financial interests. Mr. Harper is being touted as the next leader of the Canadian Alliance, but power brokers close to Ontario Premier Mike Harris have publicly stated that they have no interest in a party headed by Harper.
The non-Liberal "Right" is thus deeply divided between the social and fiscal conservatives and between those who represent eastern capital and those who represent oil capital. There is a further division in Quebec over the issue of sovereignty. Any attempt to unite any or all of these warring factions in a single party would appear doomed to failure from the outset.
Jean Chretien wants to take advantage of this disarray amongst conservatives to re-establish the Liberal Party in the West and become a true national party once again. Whether he can accomplish that also remains to be seen, but even if he does it will only exacerbate the crisis of Canadian representative democracy.
The only certainty is that the disequilibrium in the Canadian electoral system ushered in by the 1993 federal election will continue to plague the Canadian ruling elite for the foreseeable future, and the longer it persists the closer Canada will slide towards a full-blown political crisis. The Canadian people must get organized to take advantage of such a crisis if and when it occurs.