Oil pump at sunset in Longview, Alberta

More in common than we think

SYLVAIN COMEAU | Quebec may be an enduring mystery to western Canada, but sometimes the ways of the West seem strange to us as well; witness the popularity of Preston Manning. But University of Calgary political scientist Tom Flanagan says that, politically, the two regions have much in common. "The most interesting aspect of politics in western Canada is its tendency to generate new political parties," Flanagan said in a lecture at the Leacock Building last Tuesday. "This has been going on for over a century, and shows no signs of stopping." Flanagan, a former advisor to the Reform Party, is currently the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada's Seagram visiting chair in Canadian studies. "Not surprisingly, Quebec, the other region of Canada in which many voters are fundamentally dissatisfied with the terms of Confederation, has demonstrated a similar proclivity for creating new political parties," said Flanagan. Despite the strong ideological bent of regionally based parties, he observed that recent election results suggest that proximity has a stronger influence than political ideology. "The NDP is the heir of the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, founded in Calgary in 1932. The CCF/NDP has always aspired to be a national party, but it still bears the marks of its western origins. After the recent Manitoba election, the NDP now governs three of the four western provinces. "Yet, in the 1997 federal election, voters in the same region filled 60 of their 90 seats in the House of Commons with members of the Reform Party, which stands at the opposite end of the ideological spectrum from the NDP. What can one make of this except to say that, while western voters may swing left or right, they like to support parties rooted in their own region?" On the federal political front, both the West and Quebec, in fact, have stubbornly gone their own way, insisting on defying the mainstream (otherwise known as Ontario). "The parallelism between Quebec and the West is nicely illustrated by the fact that in 1993 a new party from Quebec -- the Bloc Québécois -- was elected the Official Opposition in the House of Commons and was then replaced in that role in 1997 by a new party from the West -- the Reform Party of Canada. "Meanwhile, the Liberals continue to govern through their overwhelming domination of Ontario. The federal politics of the 1990s are an exaggerated version of a tableau that has often reappeared in modern Canadian history, in which political forces based in Ontario fight off challenges arising from Quebec and/or the West." Flanagan says that the prolific output of new parties from both Quebec and the West stems from the same wellsprings of anti-federalist sentiment. "Historians and political scientists have identified three major features of western politics that seem to perpetuate themselves across the generations in the various new parties as they arise. I would describe these as suspicion of external control, rejection of Canada's federal parliamentary system, and a thirst for fundamental solutions... I believe that similar characteristics tend to appear in Quebec's unique political parties, except that in Quebec, nationalism plays the role that populism plays in western Canada." Flanagan argues that the federal government has provided plenty of ammunition to anti-federal sentiment over the years. "Heavy-handed federal interventions paved the way for the Reform Party's remarkable rise to prominence. In the early 1980s, Pierre Trudeau's National Energy Program, which tried to benefit eastern consumers by setting western oil and gas prices below world-market levels, destroyed any lingering support the Liberals might have enjoyed in the West. A more recent decision further played off the West against Quebec, recounts Flanagan. "Then came Brian Mulroney's 1986 decision, allegedly taken 'in the national interest,' to give the billion-dollar CF-18 maintenance contract to Canadair in Montreal, even though a Winnipeg consortium's bid was cheaper and judged by the federal government's own experts to be technically superior. The CF-18 decision outraged adherents of all parties in the West. "These developments of the 1980s made it plausible for Preston Manning to argue that neither the Liberals nor the Conservatives would ever represent the interests of western Canada, and that only a new, western-based party could do so. "As a would-be national party, Reform has phrased its policies in national rather than regional terms, but it is clear to everyone that its positions are popular in the West because they represent the objective interests of the western provinces, especially Alberta and British Columbia (which) have the least to lose in case of a serious confrontation with Quebec separatism." Flanagan suggests that the West is not likely to embrace national parties like the Liberals or the Progressive Conservatives for any length of time, and says that a coalition government -- certainly a novelty here in Canada -- might enjoy more success. "For more than 75 years, large numbers of western voters have shown themselves unwilling to remain with the two old-line parties. In my opinion, the formula that is most likely to 'unite the right' in Canada for any length of time would be one that has not yet been tried, that is, an electoral coalition of two or more regionally based parties that would retain their separate identities, refrain from running candidates against each other, co-operate in parliament to advance shared positions, and form a coalition government if the voters ever saw fit to endow them with enough seats." Similar political formulas have worked in Australia and Germany, says Flanagan. "There is no guarantee that it would work here, but it seems to me to be worth trying in light of the abundant historical evidence that national conservative parties in Canada are fated to suffer shipwreck on the shoals of regional differences."