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Harper's "new" Confederation

The Demise of Canada






 

TEXT OF HARPER'S SPEECH

Canadian Press

Ottawa -

The full text of a speech by Stephen Harper, then vice-president of the
National Citizens Coalition, to a June 1997 Montreal meeting of the Council
for National Policy, a right-wing U.S. think tank, and taken from the
council's website:

Ladies and gentlemen, let me begin by giving you a big welcome to Canada.
Let's start up with a compliment. You're here from the second greatest
nation on earth. But seriously, your country, and particularly your
conservative movement, is a light and an inspiration to people in this
country and across the world.

Now, having given you a compliment, let me also give you an insult. I was
asked to speak about Canadian politics. It may not be true, but it's
legendary that if you're like all Americans, you know almost nothing except
for your own country. Which makes you probably knowledgeable about one more
country than most Canadians.

But in any case, my speech will make that assumption. I'll talk fairly
basic stuff. If it seems pedestrian to some of you who do know a lot about
Canada, I apologize.

I'm going to look at three things. First of all, just some basic facts
about Canada that are relevant to my talk, facts about the country and its
political system, its civics. Second, I want to take a look at the party
system that's developed in Canada from a conventional left/right, or
liberal/conservative perspective. The third thing I'm going to do is look
at the political system again, because it can't be looked at in this
country simply from the conventional perspective.

First, facts about Canada. Canada is a Northern European welfare state in
the worst sense of the term, and very proud of it. Canadians make no
connection between the fact that they are a Northern European welfare state
and the fact that we have very low economic growth, a standard of living
substantially lower than yours, a massive brain drain of young
professionals to your country, and double the unemployment rate of the
United States.

In terms of the unemployed, of which we have over a million-and-a-half,
don't feel particularly bad for many of these people. They don't feel bad
about it themselves, as long as they're receiving generous social
assistance and unemployment insurance.

That is beginning to change. There have been some significant changes in
our fiscal policies and our social welfare policies in the last three or
four years. But nevertheless, they're still very generous compared to your
country.

Let me just make a comment on language, which is so important in this
country. I want to disabuse you of misimpressions you may have. If you've
read any of the official propagandas, you've come over the border and
entered a bilingual country. In this particular city, Montreal, you may
well get that impression. But this city is extremely atypical of this
country.

While it is a French-speaking city -- largely -- it has an enormous
English-speaking minority and a large number of what are called ethnics:
they who are largely immigrant communities, but who politically and
culturally tend to identify with the English community.

This is unusual, because the rest of the province of Quebec is, by and
large, almost entirely French-speaking. The English minority present here
in Montreal is quite exceptional.

Furthermore, the fact that this province is largely French-speaking, except
for Montreal, is quite exceptional with regard to the rest of the country.
Outside of Quebec, the total population of francophones, depending on how
you measure it, is only three to five per cent of the population. The rest
of Canada is English speaking.

Even more important, the French-speaking people outside of Quebec live
almost exclusively in the adjacent areas, in northern New Brunswick and in
Eastern Ontario.

The rest of Canada is almost entirely English speaking. Where I come from,
Western Canada, the population of francophones ranges around one to two per
cent in some cases. So it's basically an English-speaking country, just as
English-speaking as, I would guess, the northern part of the United States.

But the important point is that Canada is not a bilingual country. It is a
country with two languages. And there is a big difference.

As you may know, historically and especially presently, there's been a lot
of political tension between these two major language groups, and between
Quebec and the rest of Canada.

Let me take a moment for a humorous story. Now, I tell this with some
trepidation, knowing that this is a largely Christian organization.

The National Citizens Coalition, by the way, is not. We're on the sort of
libertarian side of the conservative spectrum. So I tell this joke with a
little bit of trepidation. But nevertheless, this joke works with Canadian
audiences of any kind, anywhere in Canada, both official languages, any
kind of audience.

It's about a constitutional lawyer who dies and goes to heaven. There, he
meets God and gets his questions answered about life. One of his questions
is, "God, will this problem between Quebec and the rest of Canada ever be
resolved?'' And God thinks very deeply about this, as God is wont to do.
God replies, "Yes, but not in my lifetime.''

I'm glad to see you weren't offended by that. I've had the odd religious
person who's been offended. I always tell them, "Don't be offended. The
joke can't be taken seriously theologically. It is, after all, about a
lawyer who goes to heaven.''

In any case. My apologies to Eugene Meyer of the Federalist Society.

Second, the civics, Canada's civics.

On the surface, you can make a comparison between our political system and
yours. We have an executive, we have two legislative houses, and we have a
Supreme Court.

However, our executive is the Queen, who doesn't live here. Her
representative is the Governor General, who is an appointed buddy of the
Prime Minister.

Of our two legislative houses, the Senate, our upper house, is appointed,
also by the Prime Minister, where he puts buddies, fundraisers and the
like. So the Senate also is not very important in our political system.

And we have a Supreme Court, like yours, which, since we put a charter of
rights in our constitution in 1982, is becoming increasingly arbitrary and
important. It is also appointed by the Prime Minister. Unlike your Supreme
Court, we have no ratification process.

So if you sort of remove three of the four elements, what you see is a
system of checks and balances which quickly becomes a system that's
described as unpaid checks and political imbalances.

What we have is the House of Commons. The House of Commons, the bastion of
the Prime Minister's power, the body that selects the Prime Minister, is an
elected body. I really emphasize this to you as an American group: It's not
like your House of Representatives. Don't make that comparison.

What the House of Commons is really like is the United States electoral
college. Imagine if the electoral college which selects your president once
every four years were to continue sitting in Washington for the next four
years. And imagine its having the same vote on every issue. That is how our
political system operates.

In our election last Monday, the Liberal party won a majority of seats. The
four opposition parties divided up the rest, with some very, very rough
parity.

But the important thing to know is that this is how it will be until the
Prime Minister calls the next election. The same majority vote on every
issue. So if you ask me, "What's the vote going to be on gun control?'' or
on the budget, we know already.

If any member of these political parties votes differently from his party
on a particular issue, well, that will be national headline news. It's
really hard to believe. If any one member votes differently, it will be
national headline news. I voted differently at least once from my party,
and it was national headline news. It's a very different system.

Our party system consists today of five parties. There was a remark made
yesterday at your youth conference about the fact that parties come and go
in Canada every year. This is rather deceptive. I've written considerably
on this subject.

We had a two-party system from the founding of our country, in 1867. That
two-party system began to break up in the period from 1911 to 1935. Ever
since then, five political elements have come and gone. We've always had at
least three parties. But even when parties come back, they're not really
new. They're just an older party re-appearing under a different name and
different circumstances.

Let me take a conventional look at these five parties. I'll describe them
in terms that fit your own party system, the left/right kind of terms.

Let's take the New Democratic Party, the NDP, which won 21 seats. The NDP
could be described as basically a party of liberal Democrats, but it's
actually worse than that, I have to say. And forgive me jesting again, but
the NDP is kind of proof that the Devil lives and interferes in the affairs
of men.

This party believes not just in large government and in massive
redistributive programs, it's explicitly socialist. On social value issues,
it believes the opposite on just about everything that anybody in this room
believes. I think that's a pretty safe bet on all social-value kinds of
questions.

Some people point out that there is a small element of clergy in the NDP.
Yes, this is true. But these are clergy who, while very committed to the
church, believe that it made a historic error in adopting Christian
theology.

The NDP is also explicitly a branch of the Canadian Labour Congress, which
is by far our largest labour group, and explicitly radical.

There are some moderate and conservative labour organizations. They don't
belong to that particular organization.

The second party, the Liberal party, is by far the largest party. It won
the election. It's also the only party that's competitive in all parts of
the country. The Liberal party is our dominant party today, and has been
for 100 years. It's governed almost all of the last hundred years, probably
about 75 per cent of the time.

It's not what you would call conservative Democrat; I think that's a
disappearing kind of breed. But it's certainly moderate Democrat, a type of
Clinton-pragmatic Democrat. It's moved in the last few years very much to
the right on fiscal and economic concerns, but still believes in government
intrusion in the economy where possible, and does, in its majority, believe
in fairly liberal social values.

In the last Parliament, it enacted comprehensive gun control, well beyond,
I think, anything you have. Now we'll have a national firearms registration
system, including all shotguns and rifles. Many other kinds of weapons have
been banned. It believes in gay rights, although it's fairly cautious. It's
put sexual orientation in the Human Rights Act and will let the courts do
the rest.

There is an important caveat to its liberal social values. For historic
reasons that I won't get into, the Liberal party gets the votes of most
Catholics in the country, including many practising Catholics. It does have
a significant Catholic, social-conservative element which occasionally
disagrees with these kinds of policy directions. Although I caution you
that even this Catholic social conservative element in the Liberal party is
often quite liberal on economic issues.

Then there is the Progressive Conservative party, the PC party, which won
only 20 seats. Now, the term Progressive Conservative will immediately
raise suspicions in all of your minds. It should. It's obviously kind of an
oxymoron. But actually, its origin is not progressive in the modern sense.
The origin of the term "progressive'' in the name stems from the
Progressive Movement in the 1920s, which was similar to that in your own
country.

But the Progressive Conservative is very definitely liberal Republican.
These are people who are moderately conservative on economic matters, and
in the past have been moderately liberal, even sometimes quite liberal on
social policy matters.

In fact, before the Reform Party really became a force in the late '80s,
early '90s, the leadership of the Conservative party was running the
largest deficits in Canadian history. They were in favour of gay rights
officially, officially for abortion on demand. Officially -- what else can
I say about them? Officially for the entrenchment of our universal,
collectivized, health-care system and multicultural policies in the
constitution of the country.

At the leadership level anyway, this was a pretty liberal group. This
explains one of the reasons why the Reform party has become such a power.

The Reform party is much closer to what you would call conservative
Republican, which I'll get to in a minute.

The Bloc Quebecois, which I won't spend much time on, is a strictly Quebec
party, strictly among the French-speaking people of Quebec. It is an ethnic
separatist party that seeks to make Quebec an independent, sovereign nation.

By and large, the Bloc Quebecois is centre-left in its approach. However,
it is primarily an ethnic coalition. It's always had diverse elements. It
does have an element that is more on the right of the political spectrum,
but that's definitely a minority element.

Let me say a little bit about the Reform party because I want you to be
very clear on what the Reform party is and is not.

The Reform party, although described by many of its members, and most of
the media, as conservative, and conservative in the American sense,
actually describes itself as populist. And that's the term its leader,
Preston Manning, uses.

This term is not without significance. The Reform party does stand for
direct democracy, which of course many American conservatives do, but also
it sees itself as coming from a long tradition of populist parties of
Western Canada, not all of which have been conservative.

It also is populist in the very real sense, if I can make American
analogies to it -- populist in the sense that the term is sometimes used
with Ross Perot.

The Reform party is very much a leader-driven party. It's much more a real
party than Mr. Perot's party -- by the way, it existed before Mr. Perot's
party. But it's very much leader-driven, very much organized as a personal
political vehicle. Although it has much more of a real organization than
Mr. Perot does.

But the Reform party only exists federally. It doesn't exist at the
provincial level here in Canada. It really exists only because Mr. Manning
is pursuing the position of prime minister. It doesn't have a broader
political mandate than that yet. Most of its members feel it should, and,
in their minds, actually it does.

It also has some Buchananist tendencies. I know there are probably many
admirers of Mr. Buchanan here, but I mean that in the sense that there are
some anti-market elements in the Reform Party. So far, they haven't been
that important, because Mr. Manning is, himself, a fairly orthodox economic
conservative.

The predecessor of the Reform party, the Social Credit party, was very much
like this. Believing in funny money and control of banking, and a whole
bunch of fairly non-conservative economic things.

So there are some non-conservative tendencies in the Reform party, but,
that said, the party is clearly the most economically conservative party in
the country. It's the closest thing we have to a neo-conservative party in
that sense.

It's also the most conservative socially, but it's not a theocon party, to
use the term. The Reform party does favour the use of referendums and free
votes in Parliament on moral issues and social issues.

The party is led by Preston Manning, who is a committed, evangelical
Christian. And the party in recent years has made some reference to family
values and to family priorities. It has some policies that are definitely
social-conservative, but it's not explicitly so.

Many members are not, the party officially is not, and, frankly, the party
has had a great deal of trouble when it's tried to tackle those issues.

Last year, when we had the Liberal government putting the protection of
sexual orientation in our Human Rights Act, the Reform Party was opposed to
that, but made a terrible mess of the debate. In fact, discredited itself
on that issue, not just with the conventional liberal media, but even with
many social conservatives by the manner in which it mishandled that.

So the social conservative element exists. Mr. Manning is a Christian, as
are most of the party's senior people. But it's not officially part of the
party. The party hasn't quite come to terms with how that fits into it.

That's the conventional analysis of the party system.

Let me turn to the non-conventional analysis, because frankly, it's
impossible, with just left/right terminology to explain why we would have
five parties, or why we would have four parties on the conventional
spectrum. Why not just two?

The reason is regional division, which you'll see if you carefully look at
a map. Let me draw the United States comparison, a comparison with your
history.

The party system that is developing here in Canada is a party system that
replicates the antebellum period, the pre-Civil War period of the United
States.

That's not to say -- and I would never be quoted as saying -- we're headed
to a civil war. But we do have a major secession crisis, obviously of a
very different nature than the secession crisis you had in the 1860s. But
the dynamics, the political and partisan dynamics of this, are remarkably
similar.

The Bloc Quebecois is equivalent to your Southern secessionists, Southern
Democrats, states rights activists. The Bloc Quebecois, its 44 seats, come
entirely from the province of Quebec. But even more strikingly, they come
from ridings, or election districts, almost entirely populated by the
descendants of the original European French settlers.

The Liberal party has 26 seats in Quebec. Most of these come from areas
where there are heavy concentrations of English, aboriginal or ethnic
votes. So the Bloc Quebecois is very much an ethnic party, but it's also a
secession party.

In the referendum two years ago, the secessionists won 49 per cent of the
vote, 49.5 per cent. So this is a very real crisis. We're looking at
another referendum before the turn of the century.

The Progressive Conservative party is very much comparable to the Whigs of
the 1850s and 1860s. What is happening to them is very similar to the
Whigs. A moderate conservative party, increasingly under stress because of
the secession movement, on the one hand, and the reaction to that movement
from harder line English Canadians on the other hand.

You may recall that the Whigs, in their dying days, went through a series
of metamorphoses. They ended up as what was called the Unionist movement
that won some of the border states in your 1860 election.

If you look at the surviving PC support, it's very much concentrated in
Atlantic Canada, in the provinces to the east of Quebec. These are very
much equivalent to the United States border states. They're weak
economically. They have very grim prospects if Quebec separates. These
people want a solution at almost any cost. And some of the solutions they
propose would be exactly that.

They also have a small percentage of seats in Quebec. These are
French-speaking areas that are also more moderate and very concerned about
what would happen in a secession crisis.

The Liberal party is very much your northern Democrat, or mainstream
Democratic party, a party that is less concessionary to the secessionists
than the PCs, but still somewhat concessionary. And they still occupy the
mainstream of public opinion in Ontario, which is the big and powerful
province, politically and economically, alongside Quebec.

The Reform party is very much a modern manifestation of the Republican
movement in Western Canada; the U.S. Republicans started in the western
United States. The Reform Party is very resistant to the agenda and the
demands of the secessionists, and on a very deep philosophical level.

The goal of the secessionists is to transform our country into two nations,
either into two explicitly sovereign countries, or in the case of weaker
separatists, into some kind of federation of two equal partners.

The Reform party opposes this on all kinds of grounds, but most important,
Reformers are highly resistant philosophically to the idea that we will
have an open, modern, multi-ethnic society on one side of the line, and the
other society will run on some set of ethnic-special-status principles.
This is completely unacceptable, particularly to philosophical
conservatives in the Reform party.

The Reform party's strength comes almost entirely from the West. It's
become the dominant political force in Western Canada. And it is getting a
substantial vote in Ontario. Twenty per cent of the vote in the last two
elections. But it has not yet broken through in terms of the number of
seats won in Ontario.

This is a very real political spectrum, lining up from the Bloc to reform.
You may notice I didn't mention the New Democratic Party. The NDP obviously
can't be compared to anything pre-Civil War. But the NDP is not an
important player on this issue. Its views are somewhere between the
liberals and conservatives. Its main concern, of course, is simply the
left-wing agenda to basically disintegrate our society in all kinds of
spectrums. So it really doesn't fit in.

But I don't use this comparison of the pre-Civil War lightly. Preston
Manning, the leader of the Reform party has spent a lot of time reading
about pre-Civil War politics. He compares the Reform party himself to the
Republican party of that period. He is very well-read on Abraham Lincoln
and a keen follower and admirer of Lincoln.

I know Mr. Manning very well. I would say that next to his own father, who
is a prominent Western Canadian politician, Abraham Lincoln has probably
had more effect on Mr. Manning's political philosophy than any individual
politician.

Obviously, the issue here is not slavery, but the appeasement of ethnic
nationalism. For years, we've had this Quebec separatist movement. For
years, we elected Quebec prime ministers to deal with that, Quebec prime
ministers who were committed federalists who would lead us out of the
wilderness. For years, we have given concessions of various kinds of the
province of Quebec, political and economic, to make them happier.

This has not worked. The sovereignty movement has continued to rise in
prominence. And its demands have continued to increase. It began to hit the
wall when what are called the soft separatists and the conventional
political establishment got together to put in the constitution something
called "a distinct society clause.'' Nobody really knows what it would
mean, but it would give the Supreme Court, where Quebec would have a
tremendous role in appointment, the power to interpret Quebec's special
needs and powers, undefined elsewhere.

This has led to a firewall of resistance across the country. It fuelled the
growth of the Reform party. I should even say that the early concessionary
people, like Pierre Trudeau, have come out against this. So there's even
now an element of the Quebec federalists themselves who will no longer
accept this.

So you see the syndrome we're in. The separatists continue to make demands.
They're a powerful force. They continue to have the bulk of the Canadian
political establishment on their side. The two traditional parties, the
Liberals and PCs, are both led by Quebecers who favour concessionary
strategies. The Reform party is a bastion of resistance to this tendency.

To give you an idea of how divided the country is, not just in Quebec but
how divided the country is outside Quebec on this, we had a phenomenon five
years ago. This is a real phenomenon; I don't know how much you heard about
it.

The establishment came down with a constitutional package which they put to
a national referendum. The package included distinct society status for
Quebec and some other changes, including some that would just horrify you,
putting universal Medicare in our constitution, and feminist rights, and a
whole bunch of other things.

What was significant about this was that this constitutional proposal was
supported by the entire Canadian political establishment. By all of the
major media. By the three largest traditional parties, the PC, Liberal
party and NDP. At the time, the Bloc and Reform were very small.

It was supported by big business, very vocally by all of the major CEOs of
the country. The leading labour unions all supported it. Complete
consensus. And most academics.

And it was defeated. It literally lost the national referendum against a
rag-tag opposition consisting of a few dissident conservatives and a few
dissident socialists.

This gives you some idea of the split that's taking place in the country.

Canada is, however, a troubled country politically, not socially. This is a
country that we like to say works in practice but not in theory.

You can walk around this country without running across very many of these
political controversies.

I'll end there and take any of your questions. But let me conclude by
saying, good luck in your own battles. Let me just remind you of something
that's been talked about here. As long as there are exams, there will
always be prayer in schools.

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