Are Canadian politics hot enough to brew a Tea Party?
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Rand Paul (R), the Republican candidate for the Kentucky U.S. Senate seat, greets supporters during an election night party on November 2, 2010 in Bowling Green, Kentucky.
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Richard Foot, Postmedia News · Friday, Nov. 5, 2010
On the surface, Dan Tappin sounds nothing like the angry, American Tea Party protesters that fuelled a libertarian insurgency inside the Republican party and, in Tuesday’s elections, reshaped the power structure in Washington.
Mr. Tappin is a soft-spoken, 36-year-old family man who works as an oilpatch engineer in Estevan, Sask. But lurking below his friendly disposition is a seething frustration with Canadian politics and the big-spending Conservative government.
“I feel fed up with everybody,” he says. “They all seem to spend our money, just as poorly, no matter which party is in power.”
A one-time Tory election volunteer, Mr. Tappin says he was appalled when Prime Minister Stephen Harper poured tens of billions of taxpayer dollars into bailout packages for the auto industry and the faltering economy last year.
“I just felt, ‘What are you guys doing?’”
He poured his own frustrations into a new website, MapleLeafParty.ca, as a “bit of an homage to the U.S. Tea Party movement.”
Mr. Tappin has no desire to start a new political party, and doesn’t know whether his blog will ever transform into an actual movement, a northern version of the U.S. Tea Party. But he’s convinced there are millions of other Canadians like him, ticked off by deficits and waste and taxpayer abuse, without a real champion of their own in Ottawa.
“I know from the emails I get, there are other people just as frustrated as I am,” he says. “There’s not a single entity in Canada, or a true political party, that represents people with views like mine.”
Is there enough anger and frustration to fuel a Tea Party movement in Canada? Could similar sentiments lead to a taxpayer backlash that influences the next election, or the one after?
Mr. Tappin says the Maple Leaf Party is one of the many “green shoots,” the very early beginnings of a populist libertarian uprising. He’s already been in contact with the Reseau Liberte Quebec (Quebec Freedom Network), a fledgling organization founded by a handful of young, right-wing Quebecois politicos that attracted about 500 people to its inaugural meeting last month.
“To have 500 people pay $35 to spend a Saturday in a room in Quebec City, to hear people talk about conservative policies — I’ve never seen that. I think it’s kind of unique. There is an appetite for those policies,” says Eric Duhaime, co-founder of the Reseau Liberte, who once worked for former Canadian Alliance leader Stockwell Day and now writes a newspaper column in Quebec.
Mr. Tappin and Mr. Duhaime also point to the growth of the hard-right Wildrose Alliance Party — which threatens the hegemony of Alberta’s long-lived Conservative government — and to the recent victory of Toronto’s new anti-establishment mayor Rob Ford — who campaigned solely on turning off the municipal “gravy train” — as further signals of rising Tea Party sentiment in Canada.
Like many Tea Party supporters in the U.S., Mr. Duhaime also says he and other young libertarians across Canada detest the growing reach and responsibilities of governments into every corner of citizens’ lives.
“Our ancestors came to Quebec for many of the same reasons they came to the U.S.,” he says. “They came here for freedom, because they wanted to get rid of big governments that were telling them what to do with their lives. Unfortunately over the last 50 years, we have lost that heritage.
“Even the immigrants who come to Canada, they’re not coming because they want to be taxed to death, they’re coming because they want freedom to decide what’s best for themselves and their kids.”
Gil Troy, an American who teaches U.S. political history at McGill University in Montreal, cautions that however passionate Canada’s Tea Party wannabes might be, their ideals are unlikely to ignite the same fires in this country as in the U.S.
For one thing, Canada’s economy is in far better shape. Mr. Troy says the wreckage in the U.S. — high unemployment, shuttered factories, foreclosed homes — is the real reason behind the Tea Party’s success this year.
“Their victories are the result of economic distress, and the fear that there’s something seriously wrong with the country,” says Mr. Troy. “If we take out the recession, if we take out the sense that there’s serious dysfunction going on, would there be the same kind of phenomenon? I don’t think so.”
In a critique last month in the Washington Post, political scholar Charles Murray agreed with Tea Party claims that American society is increasingly and dangerously divided between ordinary working and middle-class people, and a class of “New Elites” — both right and left wing — who control academia, the media and the political system, but are “isolated from mainstream America” and deeply out of touch with the lives and cares of ordinary working people.
Mr. Troy says not only is that divide less acute in Canada, but that political discourse here remains far more civil. Canadian debate has not yet been hijacked by what he calls the “toxic media culture and the toxic blogosphere” that feed the Tea Party’s populist anger.
Tom Flanagan, the U.S.-born, Calgary academic and former adviser to Mr. Harper, says a Tea Party insurgency is less likely in Canada because in our political system, unlike the U.S. primary system, parties are not required by law to hold free and open nomination contests.
The Tea Party succeeded by fielding libertarian candidates, and knocking off establishment ones, in several Republican primaries. That tactic wouldn’t work in Canada, where leaders of the major political parties fiercely protect incumbents and, in many cases, simply appoint candidates by fiat.
“You could have an insurgency here and there in Canada, but a wide uprising like we saw in the U.S. just isn’t possible here,” says Mr. Flanagan. “What happens instead is that people end up forming a new party, because the control over the existing party is too strong.”
Which is what happened with the Reform party under Preston Manning in the 1980s.
“The Reform Party was basically our Tea Party,” he says. “It arose at a time of crisis, when our deficits were spiralling out of control, much like the American deficits are now . . . the people who started the Reform party are pretty much the same kind of people that are energized by the Tea Party.”
Read more: http://www.nationalpost.com/news/Canadian+politics+enough+brew+Party/3784188/story.html#ixzz15K8ojzdW
http://www.nationalpost.com/news/Canadian+politics+enough+brew+Party/3784188/story.html
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