Replies

I guess the difficulty in comparing lies in there being so many different axes along which to measure conservatism. There's conservatism in amount of spending, conservatism in broadness of spending, conservatism in taxation (three different things); there's conservatism in moral terms and conservatism in racial terms and conservatism in doing-whatever-Bush-says terms. It's possible to be at a different place on all those scales.

Is Canada further to the left than Australia? Not knowing much about Australian politics, and going just on your description, probably somewhat. Through the 1990s, the Liberals were conservative spenders (pushed that way by the Reform Party), but didn't restrict the broad reach of Canada's social safety net. Nor were they conservative morally or do-whatever-Bush says conservative. The Tories of the 1980s, on the other hand, were not at all conservative spenders, but were definitely do-whatever-Reagan-says conservatives.

The Reform wing of the new Conservative Party is to the right on all scales (though certainly not as far right as some of the European nationalist parties on the racial scale). But how much power it'll have in the new Conservative Party is hard to say; certainly if the party wants to keep getting elected in Canada, it won't have much, just enough to keep Albertans and the interior of British Columbia happy.

(There is, however, a growing band of suburbs around Toronto - the "905 region" - that votes to the right. They drove Reagan-ite conservative Mike Harris to premiership in Ontario in much the same way that the growing suburbs (and growing suburban anger at high taxes) in California in the 1960s brought Reagan the governership there.)

Anyway, to your question: What makes our politics so far to the left?

Hells if I know. Maybe higher rates of urbanization versus suburbanization? City people tend to vote left. Maybe a much less visible underclass? Social programs are much less likely to be supported if the recipients are very different from the payers. Maybe the eloquence of Tommy Douglas and the savoire faire of Pierre Trudeau? Maybe because we were founded by alcoholics and bumblers instead of slaveowners or convicts?

I dunno.

That's why the Liberals seats in the big cities are safe. They should keep all of their Toronto and Montreal ridings. They're in danger everywhere else and its less a function of geography than one of values. As for Quebec, the way that money was funnelled into pro-federalist causes, with the kickbacks and fraud, certainly didn't help in making the case for keeping Canada together and the funny thing is Jean Chretien's legacy has given the separatists a squeaky clean image they didn't have even under Pierre Trudeau. Only Liberals could be that dumb and they're supposed to be Canada's natural governing party!

Maybe higher rates of urbanization versus suburbanization? City people tend to vote left.

Australia is also one of the most urbanized countries on Earth (the top 10 Australian cities occupy about 70% of Australian populations). Yet even in its big cities conservatives do remarkably well. Take Sydney for example. It has been commented by Australians and Canadians alike that Melbourne is remarkably similar to both Toronto and Montreal politically. Paddy McGuinness has written this on Sydney Morning Herald on 20 September 2001 on the comparison between NZ and Australia, using Melbourne and Sydney as examples (unfortunately the article is gone from the net):

... The differences between the populations of Australia and New Zealand are about as different as those between Sydney and Melbourne.

That comparison does point to an interesting difference. There is a harder edge, a tougher minded approach to many issues in Sydney compared with Melbourne. There you tend to get more of the politics of the warm inner glow, along with pretensions to intellectual, cultural and moral superiority. Typically, the Fabian Society - wishy-washy socialism for idealistic and ineffectual intellectuals - flourishes there while it never did in Sydney. There is a similar difference between Sydney and New Zealand. Wellington is rather like a Canberra recruited entirely from the ranks of Melbourne school teachers. Not surprisingly, the NZ economy is in trouble when such people are in government.

There are real differences cross-Tasman, of course. The ethnic origins have always been rather different, with Catholic Irish much more heavily represented in Australia. We had a higher intake of non-English-speaking-background European migrants over the past 50 years. And the Maoris (and, increasingly, Pacific Islanders) are a much more significant proportion of the population than are Aborigines (however defined) here.

The do-gooders in New Zealand are, as in Melbourne, much more determined to get things wrong so they will feel good inside than are the majority of Australians, so they have set up disastrous institutions like the Waitangi Tribunal which fritter money away on compensation for past wrongs in such a way as to make the present day situation even worse. They are still strongly affected by old-fashioned pacifism, so they think that they need not spend money on their own defence.

As you can see, Sydney is actually moderate conservative by urgan Canadian (or even American) standards. Australian friends tell me that the conservatives there (Liberals) routinely gobble up all electorate seats situated at Sydney's North Shore (that's about 1/2 of the whole Sydney) and they also get some seats at Melbourne. Add to it the ALP (main party on the left) is actually to the right of Canada's Liberal Party and it amazes me to see Canada's politics is like that.