Ontario: No Political Hat Trick

Back in the middle of the summer, when politics and elections were the furthest things from most people’s minds, Toronto mayor Rob Ford hosted a barbecue for 800 of his closest friends.

It was a special event honoring federal finance minister Jim Flaherty for his work helping Toronto-area candidates make historic breakthroughs during the federal election earlier this year.

Those federal breakthroughs came about six months after Ford’s own breakthrough victory in Toronto – a steak-and-potatoes conservative mayor winning power in what some perceive as a brie-and-white-wine liberal city.

The barbecue came to the attention of the media because of a surprise guest who showed up to address the gathering: Prime Minister Stephen Harper.

In a video of the event shot by one of the barbecue guests and later posted online, Harper made partisan comments about Ontario politics:

“We started cleaning up the left wing mess federally in this area,” Harper said. “Rob’s doing it municipally. And now we’ve got to complete the hat trick and do it provincially as well.”

When Harper made those remarks in early August, it seemed likely that Ontario PC leader Tim Hudak had a good chance of completing that conservative hat trick. Only two months before the scheduled provincial election, his party sat comfortably atop public opinion polls, and the trend over many months had shown Progressive Conservative support growing as support for Premier Dalton McGuinty’s governing Liberals steadily fell.

In retrospect, Hudak was trying to swim against a couple of longstanding currents in Ontario politics. The first was the tendency of Ontarians to give party leaders some extended time on the opposition benches before they are willing to vote them into government. Hudak’s two immediate predecessors as PC leader – John Tory and Ernie Eves – learned that lesson the hard way, as did McGuinty himself when he was trounced by Mike Harris in his first election campaign as Liberal leader in 1999.

The second – even more unfailing – current was the tendency of Ontario voters to vote in different parties provincially than they do federally. In the 1970s, when Pierre Trudeau’s Liberals held power in Ottawa, so did Bill Davis’s Tories at Queens Park. In the ‘80s, Brian Mulroney’s Progressive Conservative governments negotiated with Liberal and NDP governments in Ontario. In the ‘90s, Liberals under Jean Chretien owed successive majority victories to Ontario voters, who handed them near-sweeps of this province. At the same time, they were giving Mike Harris similar victories in provincial elections. Finally, the current Harper era in federal politics has coincided with the McGuinty era in Ontario.

When the video of Harper’s barbecue speech showed up online, his aides seemed to realize that it probably wasn’t helpful to the Hudak campaign, or to the conservative cause, for the Prime Minister to be seen making such a blatant partisan intervention into a provincial election campaign. A bit of an Internet cat-and-mouse game ensued, with Conservatives trying to remove every online appearance of the video as quickly as McGuinty supporters could get it reposted.

As I have written before on this blog, it helps to imagine this province as an Ontario-shaped target, with a lop-sided blue bull’s-eye in the middle, stretching across the rural southwestern, central and eastern parts of the province. That’s the conservative heartland – a couple-dozen ridings that right-leaning parties usually win easily in both provincial and federal elections.

Splotches of NDP orange dot the outer edge of the province-shaped target, where the most urban neighborhoods of our cities and the least-populated stretches of our northern regions lie. When New Democrats do well in Ontario – as they did in both elections this year – the perimeter of the province grows a deeper shade of orange.

Between the orange edge and the blue bull’s-eye is the red Liberal donut that expands or shrinks at the expense of the other colors, depending on the Grits’ success from election to election.

In May’s federal election, the Tories and the NDP both took big bites out of different sides of that donut – most notably in Toronto-area ridings. The result was the worst showing ever for the federal Liberal party.

In Ontario earlier this month, it was Toronto voters – and to a lesser extent those in Ottawa and a few other urban areas – who preserved the red donut enough to give the McGuinty Liberals a narrow minority victory.

It’s hard to know if Harper’s comments helped McGuinty win. But they certainly underlined the fact that in this province, political hat tricks are hard to come by.

And Bugs Begat Spongebob…

When I was a kid, I used to watch cartoons. Lots and lots of cartoons.

You too? Small world.

As in many of life’s domains, when it came to cartoon watching, there were choices to be made and rules to be followed.

Just as you can’t be a fan of both the Red Sox and the Yankees… or of both Coke and Pepsi… or of both boxers and briefs… so too did animation aficionados of my generation have a central conundrum to sort out:

Mickey Mouse. Or Bugs Bunny.

The classic Walt Disney and Warner Brothers’ cartoons were created in the ‘30s, ‘40s and ‘50s. By the time I had grown into full cartoon craziness, those classic animated shorts had been repackaged into TV anthology series.

I laid it all out in an earlier post on this blog:

There was the Wonderful World of Disney, home to Mickey Mouse and other examples of anthropomorphic sweetness and light.

And then there was the Bugs Bunny / Roadrunner Hour, featuring Warners’ misanthropic nastiness and bite.

Today, of course, they’re just two sides of the same lunchbox – part of a multi-billion-dollar, multi-media, multi-logo industry.

But back then, they were two conflicting halves of an unbridgeable psychosocial divide.

Well… something like that…

As a kid, my loyalties resolutely fell on one side of that divide: That of Bugs Bunny and his co-conspirators Daffy Duck, Elmer Fudd, et al.

While the typical Disney cartoon plot would see Mickey and his pals getting themselves into and out of sugary situations, the Warner Brothers’ cartoons displayed a darker, nastier, more risqué, and more broadly comical edge.

Warner Brothers’ cartoons were full of crazy slapstick, hilarious wordplay, winking double-entendres, and comedic violence.

In fact, the typical Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck or Elmer Fudd cartoon would consist of two characters attempting to murder, consume, or – at the very least – completely humiliate each other.

When I was a kid, there was much handwringing over the violent content of Bugs Bunny cartoons, which at the time were two-to-four decades old, and originally created for a more mature audience.

Elmer Fudd would fire his rifle straight at Daffy Duck’s face, causing Daffy’s bill to spin around to the back of his head. Wile E. Coyote would accidentally blow himself up trying to catch Road Runner. Yosemite Sam, dressed as Lawrence of Arabia, would beat an uncooperative camel into unconsciousness.

You don’t see that level of violence anymore in kids’ cartoons. On the other hand, contemporary kids do have much more ready access to media images that are far more explicit and violent than anything dreamed up by animators half a century ago.

Yet despite all of the handwringing, there is no compelling evidence that my childhood exposure to the Wascally Wabbit did any lasting damage to my psyche or negatively affected my social development, or that of fellow members of my generation.

Just the opposite, I’d argue. At worst, Bugs Bunny was a benign time-waster. At best, it contributed to my cultural education in the same way as did the books I read, the films I watched, and the music I listened to growing up.

Which brings me to one of Bugs’ 21^st Century spiritual descendants – SpongeBob Squarepants.

On the off chance you are unfamiliar with the ubiquitous cartoon character, SpongeBob is a cheerful sponge with … yes … square pants. As his theme song recounts, he “lives in a pineapple under the sea” in the underwater community of Bikini Bottom.

The cartoon, aside from being wildly popular on TV screens and lunchboxes of kids around the world, has all of the fast pace, wild slapstick and inspired lunacy of the old Warner Brothers cartoons without nearly as much of the violence.

But SpongeBob, too, has recently been the object of some grownup handwringing. An article in the latest issue of the journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics says the cartoon has a negative impact on the concentration levels of young children, as measured right after watching it.

Researchers compared children’s cognitive abilities after watching SpongeBob to those same abilities after watching a notably slower-paced cartoon, “Caillou”. Those who watched SpongeBob scored lower on measurements of focus and concentration.

The measurements came immediately after the viewing. The study did not test for long-term effects.

As a Bugs Bunny veteran and a parent who has happily watched SpongeBob with his children since they were very young, I have one skeptical question about these findings:

Are kids distracted because the cartoon is harmful? Or are kids distracted because the cartoon is just plain interesting?

Final Judgment is Always History’s to Make

The most memorable moment of Martin Scorcese’s 2002 film “Gangs of New York” – generally not one of the acclaimed director’s most memorable films – comes in the final minute before the closing credits.

The film – starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Daniel Day-Lewis – mostly takes place in the now-gone Five Points slum of Lower Manhattan during the time of the American Civil War. It depicts the vicious and gory turf wars between “nativist” Protestant and Irish Catholic immigrant gangs in the unrecognizable pre-metropolis New York City of that long-ago era.

The story culminates in a violent battle among gang members set against the backdrop of the bloody New York Draft Riots of 1863, during which hundreds of people were killed, many buildings were burned to the ground, racial violence flared, and U.S. President Abraham Lincoln sent in troops to bring the city under control.

At the very end of the movie, as one character’s narration describes how the city was born of “blood and tribulation” and laments how everything he once knew had been swept away and he and his confrères forgotten, the camera lingers on a shot of the graves of two other characters in a cemetery across the East River from a burning Manhattan.

In a series of time-lapse shots lasting less than 60 seconds on film but representing the passage of almost 150 years, we watch the gravestones deteriorate and disappear, the cemetery transformed into a barren field, and the city in the distance grow into the familiar modern metropolis we recognize today.

The scene is a poignant depiction of the power of time to blunt memories and to turn powerful events that seem of great importance to those living through them into hazy half-forgotten historical footnotes.

At the end of the movie, the twin towers of the World Trade Center are briefly glimpsed on a spot where a minute earlier, smoke swelled from the 1863 riots. The film was made not long after the 2001 attacks that brought the towers down, so seeing them in this context is striking.

This month, the tenth anniversary of the 9 / 11 attacks has provoked countless reports, memorials, and public and private thoughts about the meaning of the event, and how it changed our world and defined our era.

There is no question that 9 / 11 did those things. All of us old enough to remember that day will forever remember what we were doing when the airplanes hit the towers. And so many of the major international developments of the past ten years have origins in the terrible events of Sept. 11, 2001.

It feels odd that it has already been ten years since then, because the attacks still have such a visceral resonance to so many of us who remember that day, how it unfolded and what came after.

In the broad sweep of history, though, there is no way for us to know now what its resonance will be. It all depends what happens next and what happens after that, and so on and so on. That’s how history works.

Will 9 / 11 be seen as a major turning point in world history or will it fade from memory in centuries to come as did the New York Draft riots of 1863? None of us will be around long enough to know, but it is worth contemplating.

Another example, closer in memory and certainly a Canadian – rather than a worldwide – historical event: The death from cancer of NDP Leader Jack Layton this past summer.

If Layton had passed away half a year before he did, it would have been no less tragic – a dynamic and prominent political leader taken down too young. But it was surely how he lived out the final months of his life – whether or not he had any definite sense of his looming mortality – that provoked the mass outpouring of genuine grief and lament for what could have been in the days following his death.

However you viewed his politics, there is no doubt Layton went out with a bang, almost singlehandedly altering the dynamics of Canadian politics by taking the party he led for eight years from fourth place in the House of Commons to Official Opposition and ending the generation-long dominance of the Bloc Québecois in Quebec federal politics.

But it’s too early to judge whether or not those final months of Layton’s life changed Canadian history in a lasting way. Only history itself will be able to judge that.

(Re-)Living History on Grosse Ile

When we got off of the boat at Grosse Ile, attendants quickly led us into the disinfection building right by the docks on the western end of the island.

Soon enough, we were undergoing physical inspections – of our tongues, our fingernails, our skin. Looming over us and dominating the room was the giant steam-powered disinfection machine, state-of-the-art when first installed, into which all visitors to the island were required to place their worldly possessions. For most, that meant a beat-up old bag or two.

Before too long, we were led upstairs to the shower room, also state-of-the-art at some point in its history, where each metallic stall was equipped with rows of curved horizontal pipes that would surround its occupants and spray water from all directions to ensure a thorough cleaning. For many visitors to the island, this mandatory disinfecting wash would have been the first shower of their lives.

The disinfecting steam machines and horizontal showers aren’t operational anymore, and the tongue inspections were just a bit of theatre. These days, visitors to Grosse Ile arrive with cameras and boxed lunches and stay for only a few hours. Past visitors would often arrive with cholera, typhus or smallpox and would stay for months at a time, if they ever left the island at all.

In fact, any sign of disease would get visitors shipped to the east sector of the island – the “sick side”. Many of them would die there. Those lucky enough to recover would get the coveted official papers they required to set foot anywhere else in Canada.

When it was in operation as a quarantine station for more than one hundred years until just before the Second World War, this small island in the middle of the Saint Lawrence River north of Quebec City served as the first point of landing for most immigrants to our country. Possibly some of your own ancestors spent time on Grosse Ile before sailing on to new lives in places south and west of there.

Of course, in all its years operating as a quarantine station, no year brought as much tragedy to Grosse Ile as 1847, when thousands of Irish immigrants fleeing the Great Potato Famine fell victim to a typhus epidemic that swept through the island. This was a number of decades before technological and medical advances led to the disinfection and quarantine processes described above.

A mass grave not too far from the landing docks hosts the remains of the 5,424 victims who died that long-ago summer, the wavy appearance of the ground bearing evidence of piles of stacked coffins underneath.

More than two-thirds of all the visitors to Grosse Ile who ever died there over the course of a century perished that summer. When you approach the island by boat, the first thing you see is a stark, giant monument in the shape of a celtic cross – the largest in North America – that pays tribute to their memory.

A smaller monument – a plaque inside an old Anglican church on the island – is similarly moving. It reads:

“In memoriam of the thousands of persons of many races and creeds who, victims of pestilence, lie buried in nameless graves on this Island”.

I knew a little bit about Grosse Ile and its history before I visited there in person this past summer. But nothing teaches the history of a place as effectively as stepping foot in that place and walking in the footsteps of those who were there before.

Especially a place with as much historical resonance as Grosse Ile to a country made up of so many descendants of immigrants or immigrants themselves.

The Grosse Ile site is now operated by Parks Canada, and in my experience, there is no better guardian of its legacy than that agency. Last year, my family bought an annual pass that allowed unlimited access to all of the national parks and historic sites operated by Parks Canada. We visited as many as we could on trips in Quebec, Ontario and Atlantic Canada.

Every experience was worthwhile, and the history and natural wonders of each place we visited – from battlesites to unique geological phenomena – were presented in fascinating and memorable ways.

Parks Canada’s mandate is to “… protect and present nationally significant examples of Canada’s natural and cultural heritage, and foster public understanding, appreciation and enjoyment … for present and future generations.”

It’s been doing so for 100 years. I hope it continues to do so for centuries to come.

Wills, Kate, and Moi

For her first Canada Day appearance on Parliament Hill earlier this month, Kate – the Duchess of Cambridge – did not disappoint either Royal watchers or patriotic Canadians. She emerged from her ride decked out in red and white, including a stunning cream dress by the British Reiss label, a red fascinator hat with a maple leaf motif designed by Sylvia Fletcher at Lock and co., and stylish red pumps.

The pièce de résistance, of course, was a diamond brooch in the form of a maple leaf, loaned to the Duchess for the tour by the Queen Herself, who first wore the same item of jewelry on her maiden tour of Canada as a young princess in 1951.

For my part, on Canada Day, I wore a fetching black-and-white striped, short-sleeved, buttoned-down-the-middle, wrinkle-free-cotton Arrow shirt (on sale at Zellers last month for $17.99), coupled with a pair of khaki cotton Timberland shorts and – in a Kate-like nod to recyclable fashion, and to the patriotic colors of the day – I topped off the ensemble with my four-year-old Ottawa Lynx red baseball cap.

Although I have been photographed wearing that cap on numerous past occasions, these are tough economic times and I need to do my part, however symbolically.

Later, the Duchess returned to Parliament Hill for the evening festivities wearing a striking long-sleeved V-necked purple Issa dress. She retained the Queen’s brooch. Unlike Kate, I opted to remain in my complete morning ensemble for the entire day. I even retained the cap (mostly because I didn’t want photos of my hat hair appearing in the weekend tabloids).

Actually, I missed out on all of Ottawa’s live, in-person Royal watching because of an out-of-town commitment, but I wasn’t left completely out of the loop. Because I am a member of the Canadian Parliamentary Press Gallery, I got daily email updates from “Miguel”, Will’s and Kate’s (and also Prince Harry’s) personal press secretary, most of which detailed whatever outfit Kate happened to be wearing on that day.

The day after Canada Day, for example, Miguel informed me that Kate was wearing a grey Kensington dress by Catherine Walker. The following day it was a blue, lace ‘Jacquenta’ dress by Canadian designer Erdem.

I wrote back, asking Miguel to please inform the Duchess that I had on my red Montreal Canadiens 100th anniversary T-shirt, and that the mustard stain is now almost completely undetectable.

I really didn’t need to be on the press email list to be kept up-to-date on all of the Royal goings-on. With hundreds of members of the international media covering the first official tour of the celebrated newlyweds, every detail of it – Kate’s outfits and beyond – was covered instantly and extensively around the world and across the Internet.

Canada hadn’t been featured in so many international news stories since… well… since last month’s Stanley Cup riot.

But to what end?

How much of the frenzied and fawning attention to Will and Kate’s excellent Canadian adventure was due to the Royal couple’s Hollywood-like celebrity and how much of it was due to an appreciation of the Duke’s hereditary role as the future Head of State of our Constitutional Monarchy?

Probably a lot more of the former than of the latter. Canadians seem more interested in seeing Will’s face on the front cover of People Magazine than on the front of the $20-dollar bill (where it may one day be).

From the point of view of the Royal family, it probably doesn’t matter why we were all paying attention, only that we were. The Will-and-Kate show is the best PR in decades for that often controversial, sometimes scandal-plagued and frequently mocked institution.

For that matter, it’s not likely that any of the Canadian politicians sharing the stage with the Royal newlyweds – the Prime Minister, the federal cabinet ministers, the provincial premiers – were upset about the reflected attention they received as a result.

Whether you believe that the monarchy continues to have relevance in the 21st Century, or whether you believe that it is an archaic institution that has no place in a modern democracy, there’s no denying the Royal duo made a positive splash in this town and across the country.

As far as hereditary heads of states go, you certainly could do a lot worse than Will. But maybe we could consider putting Kate’s image up there with his on the twenty-dollar bill.

I’d even be willing to lend her my Ottawa Lynx cap.

Senate Shuffle

When it comes to the Senate of Canada, no news is indeed good news.

If the Upper House is in the headlines, or leading broadcast newscasts, or the subject of spirited online discussions, chances are good that it is for reasons that don’t reflect well on the institution.

After Prime Minister Stephen Harper swore in his new cabinet last month at Rideau Hall, he spent a few minutes speaking to the media about the ministers he had just appointed.

His office waited until after Harper was done speaking, and safely out of earshot of reporters’ questions, before announcing via press release that the Prime Minister was also appointing three Conservatives to the Senate, all of them unsuccessful candidates in the election that had taken place only two weeks earlier.

In fact, two of the three new senators – Larry Smith and Fabian Manning – had only recently resigned from the Upper Chamber in order to run their failed campaigns for House of Commons seats.

Nice consolation prizes. And nice work if you can get it: The base salary for a Canadian senator is $132,000 a year until the age of 75. Smith, of course, famously referred to that as a “dramatic, catastrophic pay cut” from his previous salary as president of the Montreal Alouettes when he was appointed to the Senate for the first time in December. But Senate appointments have been plum rewards for party loyalists since the time of Confederation.

If the Conservatives thought they could bury the news by announcing it on the same day as the cabinet shuffle, they were mistaken. The Senate appointments knocked the cabinet news off the front pages.

Critics said the appointments smacked of cynicism and contempt for democracy from a Prime Minister who just won his first majority government.

Jack Layton, the new Official Opposition leader, called the move a “slap in the face” to voters.

“Canadians should be outraged that three individuals who were just defeated by the Canadian people in an election have now been appointed to the Senate,” he said.

The public advocacy group Democracy Watch went even further. It called for a police investigation into the appointments, arguing that if the new senators were promised reappointments if they lost their elections, that would have violated a law against inducing Parliamentarians to resign in exchange for reward.

In response, the new-old senators said their surprising reappointments also came as surprises to them.

The government’s explanation for the appointments seemed paradoxical to some. Marjory Lebreton, the government’s leader in the Senate, said the new appointees were necessary to bring the Conservative numbers back up to a solid majority in the Upper House – a majority that can now help pass reforms to the Senate to make it more democratic.

“They’ve all served in caucus, they all support Senate reform and they’ll make a great contribution to the Senate,” Lebreton told CTV News.

Missing from the explanation was a justification for why these particular appointees – and not others – were necessary to ensure such a majority.

But with majorities in both Houses of Parliament, will the government now move quickly to enact Senate reform?

Harper has always advocated some sort of reform, but he will not even entertain the idea of re-opening constitutional talks with the provinces in order to fundamentally change the way the Senate operates – to make it “equal, elected and effective,” in the language of the old Reform Party, in which Harper cut his political teeth.

Instead, his party will soon re-introduce legislation that it couldn’t pass when it had a minority government – legislation that will enable provinces to hold elections for senators that the Prime Minister will be expected to appoint, and that will impose term limits on the winning candidates. Opposition parties blocked such initiatives in the past, arguing they would create a half-baked Senate with uneven regional representation, a fuzzy democratic mandate, and an uncertain legislative role.

Provincial governments are also mostly opposed to this plan (maybe because elected senators could challenge their own monopoly as democratically-elected provincial representatives). Quebec’s government is threatening to take the matter to court if the federal government attempts unilateral reform. Other provincial leaders, including Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty, are echoing the federal NDP’s call for the Senate to be abolished entirely.

To effectively enact its plan, the federal government will need the provinces’ co-operation.

If the Prime Minister really is trying to move toward a more democratic Senate, his recent actions on that file may have damaged the credibility of his cause.

The Blue Wave

This month’s federal election results seemed to herald many dramatic changes in Canadian politics. Some of the obvious ones: Canadians elected a majority Conservative government for the first time in a generation; The NDP became the Official Opposition for the first time ever; The Bloc Quebecois was reduced to four seats; and voters handed the Liberal Party its worst drubbing in history, and an existential crisis to Liberal loyalists.

As is often the case, the full extent of the change did not become apparent until the votes were actually counted. Opinion polls certainly picked up on the NDP surge in Quebec, but few predicted that the party – which had only ever elected two Quebec MPs in its 50-year history – would win all but a small handful of seats in that province.

Even more surprising was the so-called “Blue Wave” that hit both the suburbs and the city of Toronto. There was a strong expectation the Conservative Party would make gains in a number of previously Liberal-held ridings in the Greater Toronto Area:  In places such as Mississauga, Brampton, and Pickering. In the end, the Conservatives won almost all of those suburban seats, plus a number of urban Toronto seats that had not elected federal Conservative MPs since the days of Brian Mulroney.

Toronto-area voters gave the Conservative Party its majority, and crushed the Liberal Party. There was no other region of the country where Conservatives made such dramatic inroads in comparison to the 2008 election.

As dramatic and relatively unexpected as it was, the Conservative breakthrough in the Greater Toronto Area was a long time coming, and characterized by slow-and-steady growth from election to election since conservative factions reunited into one party in 2003.

Much has been written – including by me - about the Conservatives’ successful courting over time of the votes of ethnic minority groups that traditionally voted Liberal, including the votes of the Jewish community. With so many of those groups concentrated in the GTA, this was an obvious factor in the party’s majority win.

Of course, voting is anonymous, so it’s impossible to know with any great degree of certainty how much of the “ethnic” vote – Jewish or otherwise – swung to the Conservatives this time around. But matching demographic statistics with vote counts paints a compelling picture.

There are nine ridings in Toronto that have Jewish populations greater than the Ontario average (although we shouldn’t exaggerate the Jewish vote: Thornhill, the riding with the most Jews, is only 36 per cent Jewish. Toronto Centre, which has the ninth-largest Jewish community, is only about 3 per cent Jewish. Ontario as a whole is about 1.7 per cent Jewish).

All those ridings were represented by Liberal MPs a decade ago, when the party held a near-electoral monopoly in Ontario. Even in 2004, when the Liberals were reduced to a minority, they easily held onto all those seats. In 2006, the Liberal Party lost Trinity-Spadina riding to the NDP and in 2008, it lost Thornhill to the Conservatives, but still held seven out of nine of the seats going into this month’s election.

Today, the Liberals only hold two of those nine seats. The Conservatives have six and the NDP still holds Trinity-Spadina. If you include three Ottawa-area ridings and one Hamilton-area riding, the Conservatives now represent nine of the 13 Ontario ridings with higher-than-average Jewish populations. The NDP and the Liberals represent two ridings each in that category.

If you look at the vote in individual ridings over time, the pattern becomes even clearer. The Toronto riding of York Centre, which is about 24 per cent Jewish, used to be one of the safest Liberal seats in Canada. Former Liberal MP Art Eggleton won it with 71.1 per cent of the vote in the 2000 election. In the following election, Liberal Ken Dryden won it easily with almost 55 per cent of the vote, but his vote dropped over each subsequent election. In 2008, he hung onto the seat with only 43.46 per cent of the vote.

In 2011, Dryden didn’t even come close, losing the seat to Conservative Mark Adler, who won with 48.5 per cent of the vote compared to Dryden’s 33.3 per cent. The story of election-to-election decline is the same in all of the ridings with higher-than-average Jewish populations, even the few in which the Liberals salvaged wins.  It’s also the same in other “ethnic” ridings.

If this voting pattern continues, the country could have a Conservative majority government for many more years to come.

Election Matters… Elections Matter

Do you remember, just before the recent federal election, when I predicted – on this very blog – the following scenarios?:

* I predicted that Prime Minister Stephen Harper would run a plodding, repetitive, bubble-like campaign, highlighted by an almost daily parade of negative news headlines and mini-scandals, in which he would answer almost every question posed to him with a rote warning that the country faced dire consequences unless voters elected a stable, secure, national, majority Conservative government. I wrote that on Election Day, Canadians would give his party exactly what he asked for, thanks mostly to voters in the Greater Toronto area.

* I predicted that NDP Leader Jack Layton, fresh from hip surgery and a bout with cancer, would fire up the imaginations of voters with the sheer force of his personality and with campaign speeches that spoke of the “winds of change”. I foretold that those winds would carry him right into the Office of the Leader of the Opposition, thanks mostly to the province of Quebec, which would elect almost 60 neophyte NDP MPs to the next Parliament – more than half of the NDP’s new caucus, and more seats than they had ever won before.

* I predicted that Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff would run a high-energy but ultimately fruitless campaign that would lead his party to its worst-ever electoral result, that it would be reduced to third party status in the House of Commons for the first time in Canadian history, and that Ignatieff would lose his own Toronto-area seat and resign as leader the morning after the election. In fact, I predicted that the Liberal Party would lose most of the Toronto-area ridings that it held for six election campaigns and almost two decades.

* I predicted that after two decades dominating federal politics in Quebec, Bloc Quebecois Leader Gilles Duceppe would run an increasingly desperate campaign that would lead his party into political oblivion, that the Bloc would be reduced to a rump of four seats, lose official party status in the House of Commons and that Duceppe would also lose his own seat and announce the end of his political career on election night. I also noted that the Bloc’s historic defeat would likely come at the hands of a New Democratic Party that had never had more than a single Quebec MP in the House of Commons at any one time, and whose successful candidates would include a 19-year-old university student and an anglophone Ottawa bartender who spent more of the campaign in Las Vegas than in her rural francophone riding.

* Finally, I predicted that – although her party would earn a smaller percentage of the popular vote than it did in the last election, and she would be excluded from the televised leader debates – Green Party Leader Elizabeth May would make history by becoming the first-ever member of that party to win a seat in the House of Commons, that she would unseat a veteran cabinet minister, and that she would be returning to Ottawa as the MP for Saanich – Gulf Islands, British Columbia.

I predicted all of these things. I really did.

You saw that old blog post of mine, didn’t you? I must have lost the link…

If not, you’ll just have to take my word that I saw everything coming all along.

Or maybe you should take note of the short sentence that opened up John Duffy’s 2002 book, “Fights of Our Lives: Elections, Leadership and the Making of Canada”.

“Elections matter,” Duffy wrote.

When the 2011 federal election began, nobody could have foreseen what the results would be, even though many people – myself included – figured the most likely outcome would be roughly the status quo: A Conservative minority government, a Liberal official opposition, a few dozen NDP MPs, the Bloc continuing its hold on most Quebec ridings, and the resumption of what had been almost seven years of volatile minority political wrangling, machinations, and brinkmanship.

What happened instead was the biggest sea change in Canadian federal politics in recent memory. In one night, for better or worse, Canadian voters put Stephen Harper into the history books as one of the most successful and longest-serving Conservative Prime Ministers in history (assuming he serves out his full mandate), gave the NDP an unprecedented influence, probably destroyed the Bloc Quebecois entirely, and put in grave doubt the future of the Liberal Party of Canada – the most successful 20th Century political party in the Western democratic world.

Elections matter indeed.

Programming Note: Election Specials

CPAC sent me on the road for a few days during the current election campaign to produce a couple of election specials hosted by Catherine Clark. Here is what we came up with:

War Rooms

The Other Voice: Women and Canadian Politics

Political Barricades to Political Welcome Mats

I’ve recently written in this corner that the outcome of the upcoming federal election could come down to the choices of voters in a couple of dozen ridings with large ethnic minority populations.

The political parties have devoted a disproportionate amount of their leaders’ time – and of their campaigns’ resources – to wooing the so-called “ethnic vote”.

The Conservative Party in particular has spent a number of years trying to engage with immigrant and minority communities in an attempt to reverse the Liberal Party’s generations-long hold on their votes. Conservatives argue that their values most closely match those of members of those communities. Liberals disagree and accuse the Conservatives of pandering for votes.

In the end, the relative success of the parties in winning the support of such voters could very well be the critical factor that determines the shape of the next government.

If members of Canada’s political class today demonstrate common cause with minority communities, recruit minority candidates, and make strong public pitches for the support of minority voters, it’s important to note that this wasn’t always the case in this country.

It wasn’t too many years ago – in the lifetimes of many Canadians – that overt racism and anti-Semitism were not only part of the culture, but also a reality of political life.

An episode of a recent critically acclaimed documentary series by Ottawa journalist Holly Doan shines a spotlight on the discrimination faced by Canadian minority groups, particularly Jews, in the decade following the Second World War. Of particular note is the way that discrimination extended into the corridors of power.

Doan’s work, called “The Fifties”, is a sweeping nine-part series covering many different stories about a decade that transformed Canada. The series debuted last month on CPAC – the Cable Public Access Channel – and is now viewable in its entirety on the cpac.ca website. (Full disclosure: I produce a program for CPAC, although I was not involved in any way with the documentary in question).

In an episode of the series called “One Canada”, Doan introduces us to dubious characters such as Solon Low, the MP from Peace River Alberta, who led the Social Credit Party in the House of Commons from 1944 until 1958. Low believed that Jews were not only behind Communism, but also that they funded Adolf Hitler. One Social Credit MP of the era spoke of world dictatorship and “Zionist control of the press and radio” in a House of Commons debate. The party was charged with using Parliamentary mail to distribute anti-Semitic literature.

Although the Socreds were never a major force in national politics, the documentary shows how the attitudes of the era – a time when many properties and jobs were limited to white Christians – were reflected in the way governments operated.

A former journalist recalls how Jewish members of the Ontario legislature sat as independents because “parties didn’t want them.” On Parliament Hill, Jewish MPs had been elected to the House of Commons since 1871, but eight decades later, no Canadian Prime Minister had ever appointed a Jew into cabinet or to the Senate.

Liberal PM Louis St-Laurent finally made longtime Toronto MP David Croll the first Jewish senator in 1955. But the documentary makes clear that appointment only came about because St-Laurent – a man who publicly condemned bigotry – did not have the political courage to face down anti-Semites in his party and bring the talented and popular Croll into his cabinet. On top of a decade of experience as a backbench MP, Croll also had been a successful mayor in Windsor and a provincial cabinet minister. It was only his Jewish heritage that kept him out of federal cabinet.

Canada wouldn’t have its first Jewish cabinet minister until 1969, when Pierre Trudeau made Herb Gray a minister without portfolio. Interviewed in the documentary, Gray puts his accomplishment into historical perspective:

“I’m not saying there weren’t others like Dave Croll who were worthy of that, but it fell to me to have that distinction (as the first Jewish cabinet minister).”

The hero of the “One Canada” episode of “The Fifties” is John Diefenbaker, the longtime civil liberties advocate who became Prime Minister in 1957, and introduced the first Canadian Bill of Rights three years later. Historian Desmond Morton says Diefenbaker’s bill helped make “all those hatreds that this country had in its belly… unreal, meaningless, stupid, embarrassing.”

Only a few decades down the road, political barricades have turned into political welcome mats. It’s a history worth contemplating this election season.