On October 19 Canadians will vote and the "photographs" of the surveys show a clear division among voters that could bring an end to a decade of governments of the Conservative Party of Canada (CPC) under Prime Minister Stephen Harper, who in this brief lapse of time has introduced radical changes in important institutions of democratic life and in social programmes, in the national economy and foreign affairs, to the point where for many Canadian citizens, today's Canada is unrecognizable with respect to the country ten or twenty years ago.

The building of a welfare State in Canada was, without doubt, the most ample and sophisticated of the Continent (which I promise will be the subject of a longer article in the future) and lasted several decades -- from the Great Depression of the nineteen thirties until the end of the nineteen-sixties -- and marked in a significant way the social and individual identity of Canadians. The successive governments of Conservatives and Liberals, from the nineteen-eighties until 2005 were eating away at this welfare State, but its dismantlement is the work of Stephen Harper.

It is in this historical context that Canadians will vote on October 19 to elect the 338 members of the Federal Parliament, and for the moment surveys indicate the possibility of a Parliament with two principal benches of comparable forces: that of the CPC of Stephen Harper and that of the New Democratic Party (NDP) led by Thomas Mulcair. A third growing force is the Liberal Party of Canada, (LPC) led by Justin Trudeau, son of the former Prime Minister, Pierre Elliott Trudeau.

If one considers that Harper has led the government in Ottawa for ten years and that of all the "advanced" countries of the West, he is the governing leader who has applied the neoliberal recipes with the greatest control, force and determination, with the well-known results of deindustrialization, concentration of wealth in fewer hands, weakening of democracy in society, this is without doubt a crucial election for the future of Canadian society.

The “winds of August”

With the coffers of the CPC full and taking advantage of the difficulties of financing on the part of the NDP and the PLC, Mr. Harper dissolved the Parliament on August 2, launching what will be the longest and most expensive electoral campaign in the history of Canada. This will be a political marathon destined -- in the plans of Harper -- to give him a new electoral mandate. 

But the month of August brought “wind changes” in the Anglo-Saxon political world, that is to say in the USA and in Great Britain, and as it appears, in Canada too. In a word, for the first time in many decades, in the central countries of the neoliberal empire, there is a growing rejection of the “establishment”, of the elites who exercise control with an authoritarian -- not to say dictatorial -- manner over the powers of politics and the economy; that is to say, the unchangeable neoliberal status quo that is provoking the process of impoverishment, unemployment and social dissolution that accompanies the radical concentration of wealth in a few hands.

Thus in a way that could not have been foreseen, in the primaries to choose candidates for the Republican and Democratic parties for the presidential elections in the United States, there are two candidates that the "experts" consider to be "marginal" (the uncontrollable multimillionaire Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, a Senator from Vermont who defines himself as a socialist), but who rapidly capitalized this profound discomfort with the "establishment" (1), as is seen in the Quinnipiac University survey (2): 71% of US voters are “dissatisfied” with the way the nation is run, and 41% are "very dissatisfied".

In Great Britain we have seen, propelled by the unpredictable "winds of August", the rise of member of Parliament Jeremy Corbyn, from the left of the British Labour Party (BLP), as a candidate for the party leadership. The attraction of Corbyn is that he is strongly and very lucidly attacking historical and present neoliberal policies and proposes to dismantle them, and that he launches a strong critique of former labour leaders Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. Up until the end of August the surveys are predicting a possible victory for Corbyn, but both in this case as in that of Trump and Sanders in the US, one cannot underestimate the powerful attacks that the “establishment” (3) is already undertaking to eliminate them from the competition.

The "winds of August" were also present in Canada with the rise of the NDP, a social democratic party, with an ascending political force in the greater part of the country. Previously, following this atmospheric allegory, there was the "tornado" of the May elections in the Province of Alberta that threw out the Conservatives who had governed for eight decades, resulting in a government of the NDP of Alberta led by Rachel Notley with a decisive electoral victory (4).

What the surveys tell us

The present surveys in Canada indicate that Mulcair's NDP may possibly be the first minority in parliament, followed by Harper's CPC and the LPC of Trudeau (5).

But the experience of having observed various elections in Canada, along with the fact of a pending month and a half of electoral campaigning and the very high percentage of undecided votes, means that we cannot exclude surprises, among them a polarization such as that in 1993, when the old Progressive Conservative Party was almost wiped off the map.

In the last days of August the surveys indicate NDP support may have reached a ceiling as the consequence of the ascent of the LPC of Justin Trudeau in the Province of Ontario.

But what is evident at the moment, with the first past the post system of British origin (6), destined to perpetuate the Conservative--Liberal bipartisanship (a closed election in each of the 338 electoral districts, in which the candidate with the greater number of votes is elected) means that unless a polarization of the vote occurs toward the end of the electoral campaign, the next federal Parliament will be one of "three (important) minorities".

In effect, without a polarization that would allow one of the three parties a majority with 170 members of Parliament, the formation of a government will depend, at the minimum, on a tacit agreement of Mulcaire's NDP and the LPC of Trudeau for "confidence votes" such as the budget, since it is politically difficult to imagine an agreement between Harper and any of the other legislative forces.

According to the surveys, the Green Party of Canada (GPC) of Elizabeth May and the Bloc Québécois (BQ) of Gilles Duceppe in the Province of Quebec will be, at the most, marginal in the post-electoral political balance.

The "heritage" of Harper

To understand why this is a crucial election for Canadians, one has to look at the role that Stephen Harper has played in the acceleration of a process of dismantling the welfare State that, to be fair, had begun long before he came to government in 2006.

The personality, ideological determination, and capacity to control of Harper who, paraphrasing the respected columnist Thomas Walkom, has formed "a government of one person" (7), explains in part his success in applying the neoliberal policy that has dismantled the policies, state enterprises and institutions with a Parliamentary mandate that characterized the Canadian model of the Welfare State, which we may recall had survived the policies of privatization and commercial liberalization applied as from the 1980s of the twentieth century.

Harper is the visible political figure of this process, and without doubt his social, political and economic objectives reflect more the ideology of the US neoconservatives (8) than the history of the Canadian Conservative movement, that since 1987 and until the arrival of Harper defined itself as the "Progressive Conservative" party.

The springs that launched Harper must be sought in the powerful interests of the Canadian transnational corporations of petroleum and natural gas, gold companies such as Barrick Gold, the traders in grain, the banks, etc., as well as the financial firms of Wall Street and the City of London (9).

Because of all this, and much more, it is clear that this is a crucial election, even though one must never leave aside the "buts..."

03/09/2015

(Translated for ALAI by Jordan Bishop)

Notes:

1.On September 3 2015 Google registered 675 thousand links that responded to "Anti-establishment Candidates Trump, Sanders" : https://www.google.com/search?q=trump+sanders+antiestablishment&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8#q=trump+sanders+anti+establishment&start=10

2. Quinnipiac University : http://www.quinnipiac.edu/images/polling/us/us08312015_U67fgwt.pdf

3. Financial Times: http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/17d42d9c-4f00-11e5-8642-453585f2cfcd.html#axzz3kgIkmt8D

4. Election in Alberta: http://www.cbc.ca/news/elections/alberta-votes/alberta-election-2015-results-ndp-wave-sweeps-across-province-in-historic-win-1.3062605

5. Nanos Research: http://www.nanosresearch.com/main.asp ; CBC poll-tracker http://www.cbc.ca/news2/interactives/poll-tracker/2015/index.html#seats

6. Canadian electoral system: http://www.elections.ca/content.aspx?section=res&dir=ces&document=index&lang=e

7. Thomas Walkom, Toronto Star: http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2015/07/03/stephen-harpers-cult-of-personality-harms-conservative-election-chances-walkom.html

8. James Laxer: http://rabble.ca/blogs/bloggers/james-laxer/2011/05/who-stephen-harper-and-where-did-his-party-come-remaking-canadian ; Tom Flanagan : http://www.scribd.com/doc/51938443/Stephen-Harper-and-Tom-Flanagan-Our-Benign-Dictatorship-Next-City-Winter-1996-97#scribd

9. The close relationship between the Conservatives and the gold companies – with large investments in Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa, Asia and Europe – goes back to 1993, when the Prime Minister Brian Mulroney abandoned politics to almost immediately enter the Board of the mining company Barrick Gold, where he remained until December of 2013. The tie was renewed on March 27 of 2015 with the designation of John Baird, former Minister of Foreign Affairs under Harper, who had resigned his membership in Parliament and as Minister, on February 3, 2015, to be named almost immediately as a member of the "Council of International Advisors" of Barrick Gold. Baird, who without doubt will pass into history as the Canadian Minister of Foreign Affairs most aligned with the aggressive policies of imperialism throughout the world, joined this council of "International advisors" accompanied by Newt Gingrich, former Republican US Congress representative, remembered for having, from Congress, brought the Republican Party to ultraconservative positions. Both, Baird and Gingrich will advise John Thornton, who took over the direction of Barrick after having been a high executive of Goldman Sachs.