Читать книгу Full Circle: Death and Resurrection In Canadian Conservative Politics - Bob Plamondon - Страница 7

A political party that does not understand the reality of competition and strategy in a parliamentary democracy is doomed to failure.

An election is like a hockey game. It’s not about who has the fastest skaters, the hardest shot, or even the toughest players. What matters most is which team puts the most pucks in the net. Similarly, it’s not the smartest leader, best ideas, or most energetic team of candidates that matters. It’s who gets the most votes. Politics is about beating your competition. Politics is about winning.

And here’s the score: Liberal party eighty-four, Conservative party fifty-five—that’s the number of years since Confederation that each of the parties has held government. Since 1900, the score firms up seventy-five to thirty-one in favour of the Liberals. No wonder the team in the red sweaters is known as Canada’s “natural governing party,” and arguably the western world’s most successful political franchise.

Under Canada’s parliamentary system, one rule of the game is that the party with the confidence of the House of Commons is asked to govern. This is a rule that Liberals understand very well, certainly far better than do their Conservative competitors. In a country as geographically, linguistically, culturally, ethnically, philosophically, and economically diverse as Canada, Liberals have figured out that they could never win the number of seats required to gain this confidence by speaking to a narrow range of interests, grievances, or communities. To win, a party needs to build a coalition of interests. Some call it a “big tent”: a place that comfortably and peacefully accommodates a large number of voters. This might seem onerous; however, it is anything but a negative. Coalition building helps keep the country united. A system built on the foundations of confidence and consensus also helps isolate extreme positions, making it very difficult for extreme views to find a voice in decision-making. At its core, a system that requires consensus for success helps promote harmony, understanding, and tolerance.

The Canadian parliamentary system also places a premium on getting the right number of votes in the right places. For example, in the 1979 election Progressive Conservatives under Joe Clark received 35.9 per cent of the popular vote, while Pierre Trudeau’s Liberals earned 40.1 per cent of the vote. Because so much of the Liberal vote was concentrated in the province of Quebec, however, it yielded fewer seats than the Tory vote did. This is a prime example of how pointless it can be to build a political tent with too many of its inhabitants concentrated in one place.

Victory in a local constituency means the winner has one more vote than the second-place finisher. It doesn’t matter if a candidate is running against one opponent or twenty; the rule is “second place plus one wins.” In a three-way race a candidate might conceivably get elected with slightly more than one-third of the votes cast. Put ten legitimate candidates on the ballot and the winning threshold can be much lower. Winning a seat by ten thousand votes or one hundred produces the same result.

All of this may seem obvious, but some political parties fail to understand the importance of strategy and coalition building, or are simply not prepared to do what is required to win government. Take the federal New Democratic Party, Canada’s left-leaning socialist political party. While it takes more than 100 seats to win even a minority government, the NDP has never won more than 43 seats in a general election. Most NDP candidates know they are going to lose even before they register with the Chief Electoral Officer. Losing election after election doesn’t seem to bother the NDP. Unlike some of its provincial counterparts, it continues to serve up the same policies and strategies that have produced defeats in every election. The leader may change, but the result stays the same. The party seems more interested in making a point and offering convictions with limited appeal than in electoral success. The NDP is less of a political party than it is a movement. NDP members might get more from government if they became a think-tank rather than a political party. A think-tank could infiltrate the Liberal party and steer it further to the left in the political spectrum. Instead, the NDP hopes for a minority parliament where it might extract a few legislative concessions from the government, in exchange for votes in the House of Commons, which is precisely what happened in the spring budget of 2005. It is an incredible undertaking—putting a political party on the map—to produce such a limited result. Of course, it risks a much more adverse outcome. For example, in the 1988 election, which was a virtual referendum on the Free Trade Agreement (FTA) with the United States, Mulroney was able to retain government and implement the FTA with the support of only 42.9 per cent of the electorate. The combined vote of the Liberals and New Democrats, both of whom strongly opposed the FTA, was 52.3 per cent. Had they fought as one party, free trade may never have come into force.

The fate that befalls the left-leaning NDP one election after another could easily apply to Canada’s conservative movement. When conservatives become too narrowly focused, or if they veer far right, or if they fail to appeal to voters in all parts of Canada, they have no chance of winning. Politics 101 states that in a parliamentary democracy, a party with extreme views is sure to fail.

Another way to guarantee defeat would be to divide a coalition of common interests. A single party might win a substantial number of seats with 40 per cent of the vote; but a common voting block that is split into two parties, with each earning 20 per cent of the vote, will win none. When western conservatives established the Reform party, they split the conservative vote with the PCs, ensuring successive Liberal victories. As the Reform and PC parties painfully learned, it is futile to pitch two tents on the same site. The structure of our parliamentary democracy punishes those who divide political coalitions. However, Canadians who consider themselves conservative are far from a homogenous group.

In a classic sense, conservatives tend to support traditional values, established order, and free market approaches to economics. But the variants of conservatism in Canada run wide and deep, offering any number of inherent conflicts, contradictions, and inconsistencies.

There are conservative nationalists who oppose foreign direct investment and the liberalization of trading laws. Fiscal conservatives generally advocate minimal government intervention in the economy, balanced budgets, and low taxes. Monarchist conservatives follow British traditions, pledging loyalty to Queen or King. Libertarian conservatives espouse absolute free will, while social conservatives believe strongly in pro-family positions, including laws to protect the unborn and the traditional definition of marriage. Canadian conservatives have traditionally been more respectful of the rights and responsibilities of the provinces, as set out in the Constitution, than have the other political parties. Conservatives are also known as Tories, a term sometimes prefixed with the colours red and blue. Red Tories are thought to be more progressive conservatives who advocate a more activist and compassionate government that will address the social ills of the day. Blue Tories follow a stronger free enterprise model of minimal government. Canadians have also been known to follow a form of populist conservatism, a belief that places the decisions of government more within the control of citizens and less under the dominance of the political elites. To name but a few more, there are Burkean conservatives, neo-conservatives, economic conservatives, cultural conservatives, moral conservatives, intellectual conservatives, and environmental conservatives. There are even liberal conservatives and democratic conservatives, as in the Reagan democrats who crossed party lines in 1980 and 1984 to support the Republican (that is, conservative) American president.

Amidst this multitude of conservative options exists a reality that is ignored at significant peril. Conservative leaders, in Canada or elsewhere, cannot hope to be successful by preferring one element of the conservative brand. The successful leader is judged not by an ability to carry the flag for a particular faction, but by an ability to draw the wide range of conservative factions together with a common cause and vision.

It is inevitable that internal battles will be fought among like- minded people in a broadly based political party. It is natural that any one faction of a party would want to prevail. Blue Tories want to draw a much harder line on reducing the influence of government in the affairs of the nation, while Red Tories believe their willingness to accept more government involvement is a more compassionate and effective approach to government. Since most elections in Canada are decided in the centre, rather than the far right, the Red Tories think their approach offers the best strategy for winning. This may be true, but when they ignore the needs of their Blue Tory friends, they fail to take into account the big picture.

Successful Conservative leaders realize that every dimension of the movement must be represented in a single party. Successful leadership is not about letting one side of the movement dominate, but about fostering unity among a very broad and multi-faceted coalition of conservatives. Collective success comes from accepting and embracing the movement in its widest possible form.

The conservatives who have risen to the rank of prime minister with majority governments can be counted on one hand: Sir John A. Macdonald, Robert Laird Borden, Richard Bennett, John Diefenbaker, and Brian Mulroney. Only two won successive majority governments: Macdonald and Mulroney.

Conservative victories have been achieved only when the party and its leader have built coalitions representing the various factions of conservatives from all parts of the country. Before exploring the political challenges and disunity that beset conservatives over the past two decades, as well as the reformation of the movement in 2003, it is worth reflecting upon Canada’s most successful conservative leaders and the coalitions that brought them to power.