Yesterday, a Huffington Post reporter called the nation's attention to a website entitled "Run Doug, Run" behooving former Toronto city councillor, one-time mayoral candidate, and famed political sibling Doug Ford to seek the leadership of the federal Tories in the not-so-unlikely case Prime Minister Harper is soon forced to abandon the job.
While the page is visually unsophisticated and demands a right-wing agenda that will no doubt rattle the dentures of progressive baby boomers everywhere (two-tier healthcare! life begins at conception!), there's no reason to dismiss it as absurd or hopeless given the helter-skelter state of first world politics at the moment.
A fellow called James Piereson has a book out declaring America to be on the brink of "regime change." Not in the pull-down-the-Saddam-statute way, but in the milder sense that a "regime" is simply the bundle of policies, parties, and priorities that collectively form the established political order. America's regime has changed in the past — Piereson estimates once every seven decades or so — and now seems to be changing again.
Whether they are aware of Piereson's thesis or not, many observers of the 2016 presidential race have sniffed something significant from the fact that the two most dynamic, interesting, and crowd-pleasing candidates at the moment are an open socialist and a… well, whatever Donald Trump is. To use another pretentious poli-sci phrase, there's a sense these two men, in their blunt and uncensored way, have widened the "Overton Window" — that is, the sorts of problems and solutions politicians are allowed to identify.
In the UK, meanwhile, it looks like the next boss of Britain's second-largest party, the one that governed the country for much of the last 20 years, will be a man who is unapologetically Marxist, yet deeply apologetic about the crimes of Islamism and Putinism. Elsewhere in Europe, we are all by now well-versed in the rising strength of non-traditional parties, from the radical leftists running Greece, to far-right outfits making inroads in France and Denmark, to more generic populists like Beppe Grillo in Italy.
In short, if a crass and profane ex-drug-dealer like Doug Ford did wind up heading the Canadian Conservatives someday, it would simply signal that Canada was conforming to an established global trend of embracing the politically unorthodox at a time of economic and cultural uncertainty.
Regimes are changing because established political setups are proving incapable of honestly addressing issues voters worry about with rising fervour — particularly third-world immigration and income inequality — let alone doing anything about them. Even in cuddly Canada, incumbents who remain indifferent to these passions will find it hard to stay out of the crosshairs for much longer.
Last week's revelation that Thomas Mulcair once gave a paean to Margret Thatcher on the floor of the Quebec legislature and subsequent headlines about his eagerness to downplay his tax hikes in order to emphasize his Harperesque tax cuts make it clear the NDP boss is a malleable opportunist of scant genuine principle. Should he be elected prime minister on a disingenuous pretence of dramatic change from the Liberal-Tory duopoly, he'll almost certainly prove an enormous disappointment to the hard left — who are becoming increasingly indistinguishable from any other left — and eventually provoke a challenge from some Sanders-like figure (Linda McQuaig?) actually devoted to the agenda of vindictive wealth redistribution that animates progressive activists.
Should Harper go, on the other hand, the press and party establishment will clamour for Jason Kenney, a political careerist who brags about raising Canadian immigration, including Muslim immigration, to record heights in open defiance of public preference. In response, an outsider populist like Ford could be well-poised to stage a Trump-like revolt, decrying the continued import of foreigners for no evident benefit to the wage-depressed native-born. The message would doubtless resonate with the same base of blue-collar suburbanites he and his brother proved so skilled at cultivating in Toronto.
The notion that in a few years smugly self-superior Canada could find its politics as viciously and embarrassingly polarized as the rest of the western world may be an upsetting one, but just as Canada has not proven immune to the challenges of labor, class, and identity provoked by the present age, it would be naive to expect above-average solidity from our political regime.
Whatever happens on October 19, its significance will probably be overstated. It is the looming recalibration of democratic politics in a cruder and coarser, but also more honest direction that will ultimately define this decade.
Written by J.J McCullough
