Canadians who don't know much about politics but like to pretend they do will often quip that "minority governments are the best kind." These are generally the same sort of people who go around describing themselves as "fiscally conservative but socially liberal" with all the smugness of someone who just split the atom.

Such lazy sentiments are rooted in what logicians sometimes call the "Golden Mean Fallacy," in which people frightened of being held accountable for firm opinions will instinctively seek a safe, inoffensive "middle."

If polls are to be believed, Canadians are on the brink of the unprecedented act of electing an NDP federal government for the first time in their history, but will cautiously handicap it with only a plurality of parliament's seats. A similar technique was used to curb the ambition of Stephen Harper during his first two terms — the nervous voter's equivalent of having his cake and eating it too — but there's little reason to believe a minority would provide a comparable check on a theoretical Prime Minister Mulcair.

During the past Conservative majority, NDP and Liberal MPs voted in unison the vast majority of the time, with occasional splits, such as Bill C-51, making headlines precisely because of their rarity. More than any other two modern leaders of their respective parties, Thomas Mulcair and Justin Trudeau make mockery of the idea that there exists some vast ideological chasm separating Canada's two parties of the left: Mulcair, the former Liberal, has committed to balanced budgets and keeping the country's corporate tax rate "below the average of what it was under the Conservatives;" Trudeau, for his part, sounds like an old school New Democrat with his skepticism of "austerity" and endorsement of tax hikes for the 1%.

Few serious observers take the promised discipline of either man's economic platform completely seriously; most believe they'll simply follow the standard progressive playbook of raising spending on things they like and hiking taxes on things they don't, which may or may not wind up balancing the budget and may or may not buoy economic growth.

Beyond that, both want an immediate end to Canada's military participation in the war on ISIS, both want more Syrian refugees post-haste, both want tighter, vindictive regulations on "carbon emitters" (which is to say, the energy sector), both support bossier laws punishing offensive speech, both back looser pot laws, both favor an open-wallet approach to aboriginal issues.

Issues that divide the two, in contrast, are scant and obscure. Despite concerted PR efforts to remove this stereotype from the public mind, the NDP remains more agnostic on international trade and the Liberals more showily in favor, though the two biggest trade deals currently on the table — the CETA agreement with Europe and the Trans-Pacific Partnership with various nations in Asia and South America remain controversial outside our borders and may well die on their own. Justin Trudeau has a longstanding bug in his bonnet about the NDP's low standard for what constitutes a "successful" margin of victory in some theoretical future referendum on Quebec seccession, but this is hardly the sort of thing to impede day-to-day co-operation.

An unnecessary habit of modern political debate is to characterize everything you dislike as "radical." Harper has a radical agenda, so does Obama, Notley, and so on. The often hysterical nature of such rhetoric is deeply counter-productive since it offers a very low bar for any reasonably well-coached politician to clear — just don't come off as a frothing madman and you get a pass — and promotes the entirely inaccurate belief that politicians can only be dangerous or destructive if they're loons or extremists, as opposed to simply brimming with bad ideas.

Even if only awarded a minority, an NDP government will place 21st century Canadian progressivism, in all its peculiar obsessions and blindspots, firmly in charge of the nation's agenda — likely for at least three or four years. Since the Trudeau Liberals will offer no strong ideological counter-force in parliament of the sort the Liberals and NDP provided during the first five years of the Harper administration, a Mulcair prime ministership will herald no era of rule by the Golden Mean, beyond that personified by the philosophically flexible Mulcair himself.

Is the prevailing wisdom of the left more attuned to the realities of Canada's problems than the right? The choice Canadians make on October 19 will yield a decisive outcome. There will be no gentle transition.

 

Written by J.J McCullough

It's a good idea to get nervous whenever some self-proclaimed expert starts babbling about how government is supposed to work "in our system." Chances are there's a crime against democracy afoot.

Canada's constitution is vague and badly-written. How Ottawa is "supposed" to operate is not made particularly explicit, so in place of clear rules we have precedents. What's happened in the past is what we expect from the future.

Voters have come to expect they will decide who becomes prime minister of this country, which is only fair. By some estimates, the Canadian prime minister has more power concentrated in his person than the leader of any other western democracy — it was not without reason Jeffrey Simpson dubbed us "The Friendly Dictatorship." Though partisans like to characterize prime ministers they personally dislike as power-mad psychopaths, our PM is given so many decisions to make all by his lonesome — from appointing supreme court justices to sending our troops to war — a dictatorial personality is what the job requires.

In every election Canadians have been told to elect a prime minister by electing MPs from the party whose boss they want to see in charge. John A. MacDonald was sold to voters as a strong ruler of unshakable principle (we all saw that "The old flag, the old policy, the old leader" poster in our sixth grade textbooks) and the question of who's best suited to be PM has remained the defining issue of every Canadian election since. A Canada where voters were unable to make their answer known would be a democracy unworthy of the name.

Yet that is precisely what many loud voices in the Canadian media are now demanding.

Stephen Harper and Justin Trudeau gave interviews the other day in which both pledged loyalty to Canada's standard tradition for electing prime ministers. "My position has always been if we win the most seats I will expect to form the government and if we don't, I won't," said Harper. "Yes, that's the way it's always been, whoever commands the most seats gets the first shot at governing," agreed Trudeau.

In response, the "our system" folk pounced.

The National Post ran a painfully condescending editorial on Monday, furious that our leaders displayed such "shocking ignorance of the system they seek to govern." Postmedia churned out a stern little video in which Ashley Csandy condemns anyone under the "mistaken assumption that whoever wins the most seats on October 19 will form the next government." Perennial know-it-alls like Maclean's Aaron Wherry and Citizen's Kady O'Malley had hectoring essays of their own.

These supposed initiatives to re-educate the public about "our system" are properly understood as efforts to legitimize strange and unprecedented parliamentary tricks to destroy the correlation between who voters elect and who winds up running the country. They defend the idea that the leader of the party with the second-most seats — that is, the party not even a plurality of Canadians voted for — should be able to become prime minister, either by forming a coalition with an even smaller party or haggling out some deal with the governor general.

Why they care is not always obvious. Some clearly just want Stephen Harper out of office so badly they're willing to endorse any gimmicky path to get there. Others are simply old-fashioned elitists who dislike the idea of the vulgar public exercising too much influence over who rules Ottawa. Many of these same folk were enthusiastic pushers of Michael Chong's "Reform Bill" that allowed a small gang of MPs to stage Australian-style coups against sitting prime ministers — essentially vetoing the results of a general election.

Though they carry themselves with lawyerly self-confidence, the "our system" people never cite laws or constitutional clauses as they attempt to make the case for their weirdness, mostly because there's nothing to cite. Lacking a clear constitution to provide guidance, Canada's parliamentary system functions as a shared delusion held together by public expectation. You can look at Britain or New Zealand or Papua New Guinea and say, "their political heritage is similar to ours, why don't we do things more like them?" but your personal preferences are simply that, and you must win in the court of public opinion to bring them to fruition.

In 2008, Prime Minister Harper successfully helped put down an attempted seizure of power by Stephane Dion by appealing to the Canadian public's instinctive sense of democratic justice and fair play, which held there was something not right and un-Canadian about a second-place party leader conspiring with an unelected governor general to abruptly take control of the federal government months after an election.

Today Harper's critics seek to avoid a rerun, though their bossy insecurity reveals the unattractiveness of their preference.

 

Written by J.J McCullough

The image was striking. A photograph in the Toronto Star of a gang of women protesting in front of Premier Kathleen Wynne's constituency office in downtown Toronto. All were Muslim, all were in long veils, headscarfs, or shawls. A woman clutching two young boys stares out from a narrow eye-slit in her black hood.

These are the faces of a burgeoning grassroots revolt against Premier Wynne's new sexual education curriculum, a movement that has relied overwhelmingly on recent immigrants, particularly fundamentalist Muslim immigrants, for sustenance.

The press has done its best to downplay the obvious ethno-religious component of Ontario's sex ed rebellion, but some details are proving just too sensational to resist. On Monday the Star reported that the principal of the Maingate Islamic Academy in Mississauga — an institution that evidently exists — had taken it upon herself to provide a sort of "damage control" guide for Muslim parents with children in public schools (kids in private Islamic schools, the principal notes smugly, "are not required to cover the curriculum").

How is a Muslim parent supposed to respond when their child learns about homosexuality? Remind him such relationships are "displeasing to Allah." What's to be said when little Khlaid is told it's okay to touch himself? "Masturbation is not encouraged in Islam and should therefore be discouraged." How about when nice Mr. Jones announces he's Mrs. Jones now? "Allah does not make mistakes."

Ontario's culture war is important to keep in mind as politicians across Canada demand the country fling open its doors to a massive inflow of mostly Muslim refugees from Syria and elsewhere.

In an infamous CBC interview the other day, immigration minister Christopher Alexander said Canada has thus far taken in over 22,500 refugees from Iraq and Syria. Prime Minister Harper is promising an additional 10,000 if his government is re-elected. Liberal leader Justin Trudeau says he'd prefer 25,000 admitted "immediately." The mayor of Vancouver says Ottawa should bring in "20,000 each year by 2020" — or around 80,000 to 100,000 depending on how you do the math.

That welcoming a Waterloo-sized intake of Middle Eastern migrants every five years might bring cultural consequences for Canada is an argument precisely no one seems interested in making. Canada's immigration conversation traditionally relies on exploiting guilt and fears of racism in an endless contest of tolerance on-eupmanship; when Justin Trudeau accused the Tories of Islamophobia last spring, multiculturalism minister Jason Kenney shot back by bragging his government had "admitted over 300,000 Muslim immigrants since 2006." The current refugee crisis may have given this game a more fevered intensity, but its rules remain the same.

It is fashionable to draw analogies between modern immigrants and those of the past, but the refugees currently dominating the headlines are not immigrants in the conventional sense. They are not making a conscious decision to start a cheery new life on this continent because they prefer the lifestyle. They're exiles of war forced by circumstance to "pick up our entire communities, hundreds of thousands or millions of people, and move them out of a region where they have lived for as long as history has been written," as the patriarch of the Syrian Orthodox Church recently put it, according to Harper. Assimilation to new surroundings is probably not the first priority of such people, and with fair reason. Robbed of the ability to live a Middle Eastern life in the Middle East, they seek it somewhere else.

In a sane world, most mideast refugees would be directed to other countries in their region, who share enough cultural similarities — language, religion, sexual norms, and so on — to lessen the psychological shock of forced resettlement. In practice however, the burden has not been fairly born. While Lebanon, Jordan, and Turkey have collectively welcomed some 2.5 million Syrians, the decadent Arab monarchies of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, and Dubai have admitted precisely zero. The wealthiest Muslim states are outsourcing their mild discomfort of dealing with poor people in a fashion destined to ensure maximum difficulty for both refugee and their eventual hosts alike.

Rather than raise diplomatic ire about this injustice, Canada's politicians have elected to double down on an immigration regime that emphasizes showy demonstrations of compassion and ostentatious desires for "diversity" over any clear pursuit of economic or cultural interest.

Through deliberate government policy, Canada is becoming a nation with a pronounced and growing Muslim reality. Whether or not that satisfies our consciences in the short term, we should be under no illusion of its cost, which the Wynne government is now paying.

 

Written by J.J McCullough

Has there ever been a patriotic trope more transparently dishonest than the legend of the humble Canadian?

My fellow countrymen, let us drop the bunk. We love to boast, we love attention, and we really love it when Americans praise us for doing something better than themselves. From a recent braggy editorial in the Toronto Star to a much-shared column from an incredulous Californian in the LA Times, Canadians have been getting pretty balloon-headed as of late on compliments that our election is so much better than the Yankee-Doodle clown show south of the 49th.

Enough. True modesty begins with acknowledging one's own faults, so let's start by ditching these five fables of Canadian campaign superiority:

1. Our election is better because it's so much shorter!

To assert this with a straight face is to posit this country was a tranquil, apolitical Eden prior to Prime Minister Harper's campaign kick-off on August 2. True, Canada's election campaign may officially last a mere 11 weeks, but in practice the race to unseat the Conservatives has been ongoing for ages.

Thomas Mulcair started running for prime minister March 24, 2012, the day he was installed as NDP boss. Justin Trudeau's been campaigning for the job non-stop since becoming head of the Liberals in spring of 2013. That means our three major party leaders have been badmouthing one another and making empty promises for over two straight years.

Assuming we say the 2016 presidential election began March 23, 2015, the day Ted Cruz became the first major candidate to launch his campaign, the decadent US election season is actually significantly shorter than ours — a measly one year and seven months.

2. Our election is better because we spend less money!

Doing things on the cheap invariably entails a sacrifice in quality. Canada's campaign finance laws have tightened to the point where spending virtually any money on any sort of election-related speech or activism — unless authorized by the political parties themselves — is now a federal offence.

An NDP candidate in British Columbia successfully intimidated an oil company into suspending its advertising after he decided their efforts to promote their businesses comprised taking "a position on an issue with which a registered party or candidate is associated," — a no-no under Canadian law. The private sector union Unifor is currently under investigation by Elections Canada for holding a rally that may have been insufficiently "non-partisan."

It was once assumed journalists were exempt from this sort of busy-bodying, but no more. This election the Canadian Media Guild is officially registered as a "third party," meaning the output of the 6,000 reporters, editors, and broadcasters they represent will presumably be subject to state scrutiny.

You can save a lot of money indeed when no one's allowed to say much.

3. Our election is better because our politicians are nicer!

Over the last couple of months, Prime Minister Harper has been accused of passing legislation to rig elections, establish a secret police, and strip the citizenship of journalists. He has, at various times, been accused of being a sleeper agent of foreign powers, an Iranian-style theocrat, and a Putin-like dictator. A Toronto Star editorial declared him a "bigger threat" than ISIS.

Thomas Mulcair is currently accusing him of racism, Elizabeth May has questioned his citizenship, and the mayor of Oakville compared his private security detail to Nazi militias.

If this is polite I'd hate to see rude.

4. Our election is better because everyone is way more to the left!

There's a certain species of Canadian fond of saying "Harper is to the left of Hillary," or things of that sort. They associate progressivism with enlightenment, and presume even the worst Canadian is holier than the best American.

It recently became official Democrat policy to favor a $15 national minimum wage, a position well to the left of Thomas Mulcair, who only supports it for "federally regulated" workers. Both Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders have called for tax hikes on the wealthy and big business, with Hillary demanding a 40% tax on top-bracket capital-gains specifically.

Mulcair, who envies Margaret Thatcher, has vowed no tax hikes for the rich and is determined to keep Canada's corporate tax rate lower than America's, assuming he winds up hiking it at all. He has not, last time I checked, proposed dramatically cutting tuition fees, regulating the "gig economy," or anything else creative or thoughtful.

One doesn't have to be a liberal to appreciate it's the American left that's offering a choice, not an echo. If Mulcair becomes prime minister he'll prove the NDP can get elected in spite of its principles; the Democrats, because of them.

5. Our election is better because it's more boring!

Fine, I'll give you this one.

 

Written by J.J McCullough