The Americanization of Canadian Politics

The Americanization of Canadian Politics

Posted 11 December 2012

 

 

The novel presence of the NDP as the opposition in Parliament, and the apparent stark contrast between a rightwing Conservative government and a leftwing NDP, has led numerous political commentators to contend that federal politics in Canada has become polarized between two parties, similar to the polarization in the United States. The analysts who allege a polarization has occurred in Canada are correct, but not for the reasons they imagine.

The American political system is polarized between the two political parties that have a duopoly on power, and, in the USA, the Republican Party is normally referred to as the political right and the Democratic Party commonly labelled as the political left. However, the rubric political left has a different connotation in the USA than in Canada. In the USA, the left, as it is embodied by the Democratic Party, is a form of liberalism. In Canada, the parliamentary left, as it has been represented by the NDP, has been a variant of social democracy.

It has been the presence of a leftwing party, the NDP, and its predecessor, the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (CCF), that has historically offered the electorate an alternative to the Liberal Party and the Conservative Party, and which has differentiated Canada from the two party system of the USA. The early CCF can justifiably be called a socialist party, but it gradually watered down or discarded much of its socialist agenda and transformed itself into a social democratic party. The NDP was never a socialist party and has always been a social democratic one. Nevertheless, the presence of a social democratic party in Canada, even if it only followed a piecemeal approach to changing society and only proposed modest reforms that did not seriously threaten the status quo, did offer voters a possibility unavailable to their American counterparts.

This option is no longer present. The NDP has been inexorably moving towards the centre for 50 years, and although it continues to call itself a leftwing social democratic party, it is highly dubious that it still merits to be called either leftwing or social democratic. Extensive public ownership and economic equality, two former values that largely defined the left, have been renounced by the NDP, even as idealistic and long-term objectives. The NDP has no vision of how economic life should be organized that is substantially different from that advocated by the Liberals and the Conservatives; the party only proposes greater regulation of the market in order to hopefully stabilize it, but the NDP does not want any meaningful alteration to the economic system. The NDP’s expressed concern with economic inequality should not be interpreted as a desire for economic equality. The NDP only advocates that a very small percentage of the rich should pay a slightly higher tax, and this plea, if acted upon, would result in the prevailing immense economic inequalities remaining essentially intact. The NDP has abandoned any belief in the desirability of the equality of outcomes, formerly a salient value of the left, and has embraced the doctrine of equality of opportunity, which has been historically a hallmark of liberalism.

It is the transformation of the NDP from a leftwing party to a centrist party embracing liberalism that has resulted in the Americanization of Canadian politics. Canadian politics is not polarized between parties that offer significantly divergent political ideologies; it is only divided between a liberal and a conservative version of capitalism.

The New Democratic Party is now almost ideologically indistinguishable from the United States Democratic Party or the Canadian Liberal Party. NDP politicians justify the centrist orientation of the party by claiming that it has merely undergone necessary modernization, a euphemism for the party’s repudiation of its former values, and by alleging that the party is simply echoing an electorate that increasingly finds the former left-right cleavage meaningless.

A resurgence of the Liberal Party under a new leader will mean that the party will compete with the NDP for liberal pre-eminence; if there is no such revival, then the Liberal Party will remain the minor Canadian party espousing liberal values.   

The Americanization of Canadian politics, by which the major parties are now either liberal, in name or in spirit, or conservative, has resulted in the impoverishment of the electorate. The voters are now confronted with a pseudo-polarization between liberalism and conservatism, not an authentic polarization between left and right or between capitalism and socialism.