Some of you out there are not Canadian, and some of you are not even in Canada. I can't begin to imagine how terrible this must be for you, so I try to bring as much of the Canadian experience to you as I can. Thus, an update on what's going on in Canada lately.
First, the federal Liberals picked a new leader yesterday, after a leadership contest that spanned about nine months. For 8.95 of those months, everybody was convinced that a Harvard professor was going to win, and in fact he had the most support for the whole time. But yesterday around lunchtime the "Anybody But Ignatieff" forces figured out how to beat him, and Stéphane Dion went from fourth place to first in a single day.
Canadian politics has a strong bias away from surprise. A writer whose work I enjoy, Paul Wells of
Maclean's, coined
Wells' First Rule of Politics: "For any given set of circumstances, Canadian politics tends toward the least exciting possible outcome". While things got interesting in the last week or two, with a former NDP Premier of Ontario running second place and getting a lot of buzz, no surprises were expected. Certainly, nobody expected the academic, French, environmentalist with low Quebec support to win this. Not an academic because politics is about flash, even in Canada (though in a typically Canadian understated way); not someone French because both previous leaders (and Prime Ministers) were from Quebec; not someone with low support in Quebec because the Tories' stronghold is the wet, leaving Quebec's seats as the most likely to be Liberal-friendly, and not an environmentalist because it's not sexy. Well, until all of a sudden Al Gore made it sexy. There's a sentence I never expected to type.
Trivia bit for you: no leadership-convention-elected leader of the Liberal Party of Canada has ever failed to become Prime Minister since 1887.
What does this all mean? The Liberals are called, not entirely jokingly, Canada's Natural Governing Party. Take a look at
this chart showing the amount of time they're run Canada. Everyone, including opposition parties, saw this leadership race as a race to become the likely next Prime Minister. The Tories of course don't want it, but they have to recognize the sheer statistical likelihood. Stéphane Dion, already a Member of Parliament, essentially just changes seats in the House of Commons, and gets more control over the party's comings and goings. It puts the Liberals in a position where they'd be willing to fight an election, unlike say two months ago when they were a little frightened of the prospect. It also gives the Tories and NDP and Greens their true target for the next election, so they can start building their plans. My interpretation is that all three parties are going to be unhappy with Stéphane Dion, and would have preferred another target (Tories wanted a Harvard professor vs their 'regular guy', NDP wanted a Harvard professor who supported war in Iraq and torture, and the Greens wanted anybody who had not been Environment Minister).
Canada pretends to be a multi-party system, but is truly just two parties, with the others having some impact and input, but never forming the federal government so far. What this means is that the Liberals are automatically either most likely or second-most-likely to win any given election, and it changes how everyone interprets their actions. It will be interesting to see what happens in the next few months... the Tories want to find something to fight an election over, and I'm betting a small amount on the budget. Tax cuts versus the environment would be interesting, and not entirely predictable.
Next change which got press but means not much yet: Alberta has a new Premier. Ralph Klein, premier for fourteen years, was replaced by Ed Stelmach late last night. The Alberta Tories (Progressive Conservatives, actually: in theory the old and more centrist version of the Tories, but in Alberta's case pretty similar to the righter-leaning Conservatives) have been in power forever. Almost literally: 1971! Check out
this graph for an amusing view of how Alberta politics works. Notice that no party has ever been put back into power after being thrown out. Yet. A lot of people see a sea change coming in Alberta. Personally, I doubt it. But I'm not very Alberta-plugged-in, so I'm not a good person to be betting with.
The third big news story in Canada lately was whether Quebecers could be, should be, or already are considered a "nation", and in what sense whoever says it intends (sociological or political). It didn't help that
nation in French tends to the sociological usage, which is to say a shared cultural heritage, language, or even ethnicity, while in English
nation tends toward meaning "country", as in
United Nations. Seems simple, but there are so many litte mines in this field that nobody wanted to be caught too far to any side in the conversation, even after declaring their position. It will definitely come back in the next few elections and the next Quebec referendum, but by then the meaning(s) will be more muddled than ever, making it that much more annoying.
That's enough out of me. I'm going to play some more internet.
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