Canadians are to experience the delights of a super-long election campaign. Pollsters are predicting a three-way horse race in which two thirds of the electorate want to put Stephen Harper and his cohorts out to pasture. Mean things are being said about them. I find this difficult to understand. When he isn’t politicking, Mr. Harper plays the piano. I know, without a shadow of a doubt, that anybody who plays the piano can’t be all bad. As this column progresses, I intend to apply myself diligently to discovering other virtues as well.
Conservative, as a party label in Canada-to-be began as Liberal Conservative, that being the coalition John A. Macdonald cobbled together to join provinces of British North America into the Dominion of Canada. Old John knew how to compromise, a virtue that is no longer clearly in evidence in today’s ruling party. Macdonald went on to add the Hudson’s Bay Company’s fiefdom of Rupert’s Land to the new Dominion. His party was still called Liberal Conservative when he went on to the daunting task of running railway tracks across the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific coast, thus preventing British Columbia from becoming just another American state.
The Canadian Pacific Railway was a private corporation subsidized in its construction by government grants of land within the so-called Fertile Belt of what had been Rupert’s Land. This combination of public and private funding of public works is still a Conservative doctrine today. Some bad-tempered Canadian see this as a means of giving private corporations too much control of both public policy and the public purse. Being kind hearted and trusting, I give the Harperites one point of approval. That’s two.
The next significant conservative was Robert Borden. He led the Unionist Party, which was the Conservative caucus bolstered by a rag-tag collection of Liberals. Their purpose was the zealous prosecution of the First World War. One of the objectives of Borden and his party was to provide foodstuffs for the United Kingdom. In the process of so doing, Borden set a guaranteed price for field crops, capped railway rates and made the banks be kind to farmers and ranchers. These were all left-leaning policies. Nobody can accuse our present leader of being left-leaning. No points.
The central marketing agency established by Borden was gone by 1920. Another Conservative prime minister, R.B. Bennet, established the farmer-controlled Canadian Wheat Board in I935, giving it a monopoly of the sale of wheat. In the election of the same year he proposed left-leaning programs similar to the New Deal legislation of President Roosevelt in the United States. Voters blamed him for both the Great Depression and the years when no rain fell. Dealing with the parched, wind-ravaged land of the Prairie Provinces was left to the incoming administration of the Liberals under W.L. Mackenzie King.
Ottawa fought the encroaching desert by establishing the Prairie Farm Rehabilitation Administration. Blown-out farmland was re-shaped and re-seeded to grass. Marginal land was converted to community pastures, water conservation programs helped farmers construct dugouts, the Canadian Wheat Board was strengthened as was the Dominion Experimental Farm at Indian Head. Under the Harper regime, all these naughty Liberal creations have been privatized or turned into orphans. No points.
John G. Diefenbaker, who led the party that called itself Progressive Conservative, knew the value of water. He was responsible for bringing large-scale irrigation to Saskatchewan by building the Gardiner Dam to create the lake that bears his name. The Harperites value oil more than water. They have weakened environmental legislation. In trade treaties being negotiated, there is no protection for Canadian fresh water and no assurance that municipal water systems cannot be privatized. In addition, the glaring flaw in NAFTA, negotiated when Brian Mulroney, a conservative, was prime minister, is being perpetuated. Foreign corporations can still sue Canadian governments, at all levels, for passing legislation which restricts the sale of their products for environmental or health reasons. This asinine treaty term applies even when the product that is restricted in Canada is also restricted in its country of origin. No points.
I have two favourable points. Stephen Harper is also a good singer. Let’s make it three. It’s the best I can do.
