Harper in control as decade winds down but polls say Canada hasn't moved rightCanadian Press: Canada enters the final year of the decade with Harper -- a conservative thinker once deemed 'unelectable' in this country by pollsters and pundits -- and his Conservative government firmly in command of the federal political and legislative agenda. But whether the country has moved to the right is another matter...
Tom Flanagan, a political scientist at the University of Calgary and Harper's former campaign director and chief of staff, agrees that the Conservative party is on the move in Canada, but not necessarily conservatism... At the level of Canadian political philosophy or ideology, 'I don't think there's been any big shift,' said Flanagan...
Others point to the celebration and promotion of the military and the absence of national debate on pharmacare and daycare as signals of a new conservatism in Canadian politics... 'I think it has more to do with political tactics,' countered Flanagan. By cutting taxes, particularly the GST, Harper has simply starved the centre-left of the fiscal room for new big-ticket social programs...
Harris Decima recently concluded an end-of-decade telephone poll on political values of more than 1,000 Canadians and came to a firm conclusion. 'Canadians are, on balance, small-l liberals,' says Gregg. Respondents, asked to self-identify their position on the ideological spectrum, hewed dominantly centre-left.
Of relative ideologies, 11 per cent said they were fairly left and just six per cent said they were fairly right. Putting all the numbers together, 29 per cent placed themselves left of centre, 30 per cent were 'perfectly in the centre,' and 21 per cent said they were right of centre... Harris-Decima also asked respondents to self-assess whether they had become more right-wing, more left-wing or had stayed the same over the past decade... The vast majority, 70 per cent, claimed to be unchanged, while 10 per cent said they'd moved to the right and 10 per cent said they'd moved left...
Gregg says Canadians are fiscally conservative and socially progressive. And even Flanagan believes the Harper government 'probably on most issues doesn't really represent a majority view in the country.'...
The old political ideal of wanting your policies to appeal to at least half the electorate is not part of the Harper Conservative equation. 'These guys are quite happy with 35 (per cent), as long as they can get the other four (parties) on the other 65 per cent,' said Gregg... 'Conservatives can take advantage of a divided left, they can govern and they can use their agenda-setting power to frame what we talk about,' said Flanagan. 'They're clearly consolidating their political support. And over a longer period of time -- if this goes on for years and years -- it may well shift public values on a lot of stuff. But that would be a longer term process which I don't think has really happened yet.'
