Canadian left – Michal Rozworski

Questions for the Canadian left

Harper is gone, but (as a friend only quarter-jokingly said) we got the second worst outcome sold as the best, so now what? That’s the 10 second version of this post. I want to throw up a few questions or, better yet, problems that I think the Canadian left will have to face together over the next few years. There are no easy answers here.

In 2015, the Liberals once again showed that they are masters at campaigning to the left. But as we now wait for them to show how equally apt they are at governing to the right, it’s clear that it won’t simply do to say “told you so!” in four years time. It is not by accident that the Liberals are Canada’s “natural governing party,” for if anything, they know how to govern. They are experts at balancing competing interests or, more accurately, giving the semblance of balancing interests all the while closely aligned with the interests of the elite, and the upper middle class.

Still, we have to recognize that things will be different and that this affects where people are and how they relate to politics. On the one hand, the Liberals do open up some space on the left by making symbolic gestures here and there; at the same time, they close off this space by drawing the limits of respectable progressive politics. They don’t fill the void left by a weak left as do the Conservatives with their exclusionary, pocketbook politics aimed at the working class. In fact, they speak to a broader cross-class progressive segment of the population in a way that can be disorienting.

Canada missed the memo: it’s OK to talk about inequality and capitalism

There is no political rocket science to the Oct. 19th election result. Even with our slanted first-past-the-post system, it would have been difficult for Stephen Harper’s Conservatives to squeak out a parliamentary majority, or even minority, given that more than two-thirds of the population wanted him out.

If vague notions of change played the lead role in the long campaign, then the economy wrote the script for much of the rest. The Liberals won, while the others lost, on economic issues.

Since the global crisis of 2007-08, most of us have seen stagnation in incomes and living standards. The past year, with the global resource and commodity price crash, has only made things worse by taking down the last bastions of growth, albeit ones based in the toxic extractive sectors of the Canadian economy.

Together these basic facts, lived every day by millions, made it inevitable that the economy would be the defining issue of the 2015 campaign and key to whether the change vote coalesced around the NDP or the Liberals. People were clearly tired of seeing Harper represent them, but in daily life, they’re tired of seeing their debt, their rent, their children’s tuition and their bills go up, while their jobs disappear or their incomes flatline.