Defining the Role of the Fringe

"Fringe" parties can play a vital role in Canadian politics

In an op/ed article appearing in the Winnipeg Sun, Paul Rutherford has a message for Canada's fringe political players:

Go away.

In the course of the column, Rutherford describes Bloc Quebecois leader Gilles Duceppe, Green Party leader Elizabeth May and Reform party founder Preston Manning as "the worst thing to happen to Canadian politics in the last 20 years".

Rutherford accuses these parties of stealing votes from "legitimate parties" and insists that "they play no role in the democratic health of our country".

Unfortunately for Rutherford, he couldn't possibly be further from the truth.

The truth is that not only are fringe parties necessary, but sometimes they're inevitable, even when one would, as Rutherford, just as soon not even have them.

Manning's Reform party and Lucien Bouchard's Bloc Quebecois may well be the greatest example of each of these two scenarios.

A common grievance held by many members of the former Progressive Conservative party elite -- among them Joe Clark -- is that the Reform party undermined conservative politics in Canada by undermining the Progressive Conservative party. Not only did the party supplant the PCs in the west, but vote-splitting between Reform and PC candidates in Eastern Canada robbed the PCs of Parliamentary seats, and allowing the Jean Chretien Liberals to come up the middle in dozens of ridings on route to forming a majority government.

If Preston Manning had never founded the Reform party, many of them reason, Kim Campbell could have fended off near annihilation, and possibly even won.

This would almost seem reasonable. One very well could assume that the 19% of Canadian voters who supported the Reform party would support the Progressive Conservatives over the Liberals. But that would be making a fatal assumption in assuming that those voters -- particularly in the west -- would have been willing to continue supporting the PCs.

Many of them would just have likely stayed home on election day.

Many western voters had long tired of holding their noses and voting for a party that, all too often, didn't represent their interests. The 1984 election of Brian Mulroney via what Chantale Hebert describes as an Alberta-Quebec coalition turned out to be a rude awakening for many western conservatives.

Disillusioned with numerous episodes of the Mulroney government -- most notably the Meech Lake Accord, Charlottetown Accord and the F-18 Maintenance Contract fiasco -- western conservatives were ready to support a new option. They held on just long enough to help Brian Mulroney secure a victory in the 1988 election (on the strength of their desire to see NAFTA negotiated), then promptly elected a Reform candidate -- Beaver River MP Deborah Grey -- at their next opportunity.

The lesson for politicians was a simple one, but one that many politicians did not understand: voters expect their elected representatives to represent them. It's the same lesson re-played in the recent reelection of former Conservative MP Bill Casey.

The leadership of the Progressive Conservative party had lost sight of a political tradition in western Canada: the tradition of populism. Particularly on the prairies, populism was at the root of nearly every political movement to emerge out of western Canada: Social Credit, Tommy Douglas' CCF (later the NDP), the Progressives and Preston Manning's Reform party were all born out of this tradition.

The PC leadership, meanwhile, had turned their back on this tradition when they attempted twice to ram through constitutional special treatment for Quebec that western Canadians overwhelmingly opposed.

With the rise of the Reform party in the 1993 election and the crash of the Progressive Conservative party, Brian Mulroney's chickens came home to roost. Unfortunately, Mulroney himself had vacated the party leadership, and never had to fully face up to the consequences of his actions.

Western Canadians weren't prepared to support the PCs any longer. Whether one dismisses the Reform party as a protest party or not, the Reform party forced the PCs to eventually get back in touch with that forgotten tradition -- the tradition previously honoured by leaders such as John Diefenbaker.

Until the PCs did so -- which they did, via a merger with the Canadian Alliance, the successor party to Reform, which had been forged out of a coalition with provincial Progressive Conservative parties in Alberta and Ontario -- it was not, and could not be, whole.

In merging with the Canadian Alliance, the Conservative party finally reconciled its party elite with grassroots conservatism.

Some accuse Preston Manning of destroying Canadian conservatism for 11 years. The truth is quite different. Canadian conservatism had already long been on a course toward its own self-destruction. If anything, Preston Manning put Canadian conservatism on the road to what it needed most desperately -- renewal.

And just as fringe political parties can be instrumental to such political renewal within a party, they can be instrumental renewal across Canadian politics as a whole.

Sometimes, the development of a fringe party reminds us of the breadth and depth of a political problem. Such was the case with the Bloc Quebecois.

Formed as a party intent on serving the cause of Quebec sovereingtism at the federal level, the Bloc has been equally a Quebecois protest party and a disruptive force in Canadian politics (how else could one legitimately regard a party formed with the intention of separating a region of the country from within that country's own federal legislature?).

The Bloc, like the Reform party, emerged out of disillusionment over the Mulroney government's constitutional misadventures. The Bloc, however, emerged out of protest of the rejection of the Meech Lake Accord -- a feat accomplished very narrowly through the noncompliance of Manitoba MLA Elijah Harper and Newfoundland Premier Clyde Wells.

Many Quebeckers interpreted the rejection of the Meech Lake Accord as a rejection of Quebec itself. This perceived rejection would lend strength to the sovereigntist movement for the next 20 years.

Bouchard himself had actually left Mulroney's government -- in which he had served as Minister of the Environment -- after a commission chaired by Jean Charest suggested changes to the accord that Bouchard couldn't accept.

The rise of the Bloc Quebecois, and its continuing existence, should only continue to remind to remind Canadians that the puzzle of Quebec's place in confederation has yet to be solved. Until it is solved, Canada's leaders cannot be content to rest on the laurels of two referendum victories.

Some commentators argue that the days of the Bloc Quebecois -- and its provincial counterpart, the Parti Quebecois -- are numbered. They frequently cite the rapidly diversifying Quebec population, the aging of the pure laine Quebecois population, and strengthening sentiments in favour of Canada as evidence that the BQ is already on its way into the long night.

They point to Stephane Dion's Clarity Act as having handcuffed the Pequiste leadership from posing the sovereignty question to Quebeckers under deceptive terms.

This may well be so. But it doesn't solve the problems underlying Quebec separatism, and the existence of the Bloc Quebecois stands as a reminder that, despite the near cataclysm that resulted from Mulroney's attempts to renegotiate the Constitution, some Canadian leader will eventually need to be brave enough to try once more.

The very existence of fringe parties speaks to us, if we listen closely enough. These parties are all too often riding the edge of a wave of pervasive discontents. Ignoring such discontents does a disservice to Canadians everywhere, as it allows these problems to fester.

Once, ignorance of these problems destroyed one of Canada's traditional political parties. On another occasion, it almost destroyed the country.

Paul Rutherford may be content so simply wish these problems away by wishing away their political representatives.

Those of us with an eye on the bigger picture, however, know much, much better.

Stephen Harper at the Fulcrum of Canadian History

The 1995 "Sovereignty Association" referendum marked a significant turning point in Canadian history.

There had always been anxiety concerning whether or not Canada would survive.

Upon Confederation in 1867, two overwhelming anxieties predominated: the fear of civil war -- such as that which had just embroiled the United States -- and the fear of the United States itself, and its expressed ideology of manifest destiny. These two anxieties pushed Canadian politics in two directions: the accomodation, management, and containment of regional conflagurations, and a race westward to incorporate British Columbia, Rupert's Land and the Northwest Territories into Confederation.

Once Canada as we know it was territorially secure, economics became the primary source of this anxiety. Reciprocity and its not-so-distant cousin, Free Trade, effectively became political footballs kicked back and forth by the Conservative and Liberal parties, as each agonized over the emerging behemoth to the south.

Canadians across Canada clung to Britain in order to stave off the pressures to become too closely aligned with the United States. Even those (notably Quebecois) politicians who, like Wilfred Laurier and Henri Bourassa, sought to eke out and preserve as much independence as possible for Canada embraced Britain wholeheartedly, and considered themselves British subjects.

While occasional internal conflagurations -- such as the Riel rebellion, naval controversy, and conscription crisis (one and two) often threatened to grow into broader threats to national unity, an overwhelming focus on external threats to Canadian unity is hard to overlook.

These conflicts were not only partisan in nature, but also pan-partisan. Factions led by Walter Gordon (nationalist) and Mitchell Sharp (realist) would face off over economic nationalism within the Liberal party (with future Prime Minister Jean Chretien coming to favour the Sharp camp). David Orchard would lead a small but determined rebellion within the Mulroney-era Progressive Conservative party over both the Canada-US Free Trade agreement and the broader North American Free Trade Agreement.

Meanwhile, in Quebec, something was bubbling. It had exploded twice before, with terroristic fury -- during the 1970 October crisis -- and impotence -- during the 1980 Quebec sovereignty referendum when the federalist "non" side defeated the sovereigntist "oui" side with nearly 60% of the vote.

Pierre Trudeau went so far as to declare Quebec separatism officially "dead". And while Brian Mulroney -- likely as a virtue of his relationship with future Bloc Quebecois and Parti Quebecois leader Lucien Bouchard -- surely percieved enough of a threat from Quebec separatism to attempt his Meech Lake and Charlottetown constitutional efforts, one could almost forgive Trudeau for believing separatism in Quebec decisively defeated.

One must say "almost" because in order to hold this belief, Trudeau would have had to overlook the 1981 reelection of the Rene Levesque PQ with an additional nine seats in the National Assembly and an additional 8% of the popular vote.

In 1985, the PQ would be defeated by the Robert Bourassa-led Liberal party. Daniel Johnson Jr would take over from the retiring Bourassa in 1994 and would lead his party to defeat less than a year later, when Jacques Parizeau led the PQ back into power, and eventually within half a percentile of "sovereignty association".

Doubtlessly, there were numerous historical grievances that led to this stunning reversal of the sovereingtist movement's fortunes -- the PQ had elected only 29 members in the 1989 election, but returned with 77 in 1994. The largest of which was almost certainly the collapse of the Meech Lake Accord.

Quebec's disillusionment over the rejection of Meech Lake even resulted in a wholesale rejection of the Charlottetown Accord in Quebec, where 56.7% voted against it in the 1992 referendum on the matter -- a rejection second only to the 60% who voted "no" in Alberta.

Beyond a shadow of doubt, the October 30, 1995 Referendum is the fulcrum of Canadian history -- the definitive sign that the greatest threat to Canada's survival will emerge not from outside the country, but from within.

When a country so narrowly avoids being torn apart from within, it leads people to question what could be so fundamentally wrong at the very foundations of that country that its own citizens would so nearly destroy it.

In the case of Canada, the conventional explanation is basically that of a French Canadian -- more specifically, Quebecois -- nationalism that feels so thwarted that it must collapse the country in order to avenge a centuries-passed conquest.

But upon watching the CBC's referendum-night panel one may wonder if perhaps Stephen Harper's explanation may be the most cogent:

"What has to happen, what people have to do tomorrow is -- and I think a lot of people will want to do it in Quebec and elsewhere -- is pressure their governments to govern and get on with addressing their practical, economic, fiscal and social concerns.

Tonight there's been all this attention to the federal government -- what's the federal government going to do? But one of the big questions is: what is the Quebec government going to do? It has used the last two years to prepare for this vote.

Now, is it going to get on with governing itself and improving the lives of the province of Quebec?

There is a tremendous healing that has to be done. But frankly there's a lot of people who have to climb down off their grand visions and start addressing some real concerns because I think people are more sick of that than anything."

As one examines Canadian history, it becomes apparent that Canada is a country that was built upon "grand visions".

The founder of the country, sir John A MacDonald, had a grand vision of a country stretching from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific. John Diefenbaker had a grand vision of a more equal federation. Lester Pearson imagined Canada leading on the international stage. Pierre Trudeau had a grand (if vague) vision of a "just society".

Perhaps more than anything else, however, the 1995 referendum result was born out of three visions: Trudeau's vision of a repatriated Constitution (with, conveniently, his own signature adorning it), Mulroney's failed vision of himself as the saviour of Canada via Constitutional reform and the combined visions of Rene Levesque, Jacques Parizeau and Lucien Bouchard of a sovereign Quebec -- one that so nearly came to pass.

Of course, one cannot discount the roll of history in the matter either: the resurgence of Quebecois nationalism and the construction of a sovereigntist movement intersected dramatically with the de-colonization of Africa and the various parts of Asia that had had been incorporated within the British, French and other European empires. The ideas of national self-determination that underscored de-colonization resonated dramatically within Quebecois culture.

The post-1990 strengthening of the Quebecois sovereigntist movement also intersected dramatically with the end of the cold war. As Adam Curtis notes in The Power of Nightmares, the end of the Cold War outdated traditional ideologies, leaving many people in search of alternatives.

In 1981, the drastic post-referendum strengthening of the Parti Quebecois was aided in part by the utter collapse of the Union Nationale, a party that under long-time leader Maurice Duplessis had justified its often-authoritarian streak under the guise of fighting communism.

And while the Berlin wall would not fall for another eight years, many around the world were already smelling the stench of death on the Soviet regime providing the backbone for Eastern European communism.

The strong nationalist elements of the Union Nationale would also be set free by the impending end of the Cold War, and as the nationalists within the Union Nationale felt less threatened by communism, they turned their attentions to Daniel Johnson Sr's call for "Equalite ou Independance", to the direct benefit of the Parti Quebecois.

In time, Separatism became an ideology that appealed to many of those witnessing the end of the threat Maurice Duplessis had once used to maintain control over the province. What many Quebeckers viewed as a rebuked attempt to attain equality turned them instead to seek independance.

It became a new "grand vision" to replace the old vision that had been pushed into obselescence. For those in search of such a vision -- those dissatisfied with the emerging model of the politician as a manager of public affairs -- it clearly became rather attractive, at least in the short term.

The memory of how close Canada came to being torn apart on October 30, 1995 will remain with Canadians for a long time. So long as their remains a Bloc Quebecois or Parti Quebecois to pursue the separatist cause -- whether under the guise of "sovereignty association" or more honest terms -- the fear that we could lose our country will always remain.

It may not be enough for federal politicians to simply tend to the affairs of the country and allow the matter of national unity to tend to itself. But Stephen Harper was right to emphasize the risk of focusing too much on grand visions, and too little on the business of running the country.

A vision of a united Canada will always remain necessary to stave off the threat of Quebecois separatism. But we must always remember there are risks that come with trying to implement such a grand vision.

In 1995, we learned that the hard way.