Posted on 06/30/2004 5:53:10 PM PDT by quidnunc
One of the advantages of making wild predictions before elections, is that one then gets to study why one was wrong. Much can be learned from the exercise.
My own (unpublished) prediction guessed the result almost exactly, except with the Conservative and Liberal parties reversed. In other words, I expected the Conservatives to win more than 135 seats, and the Liberals less than 100. I was right within a couple of seats for the results in every province but my own. I was on the nail, riding by riding, even in northern Ontario. But for southern Ontario, where I live and perhaps have lived too long, I got the result backwards, and thus the national result backwards. I expected the Conservatives to win over 70 seats in Ontario overall, and the Liberals to hang on to less than 30.
I then spent much of Monday night examining riding-by-riding results, to determine why I was so wrong cross-checking against their statistical profiles. And the fact leapt out at me: that southern Ontario has changed, electorally, beyond recognition, over the last decade or so. I had failed to take sufficiently seriously observations that I had myself been making.
Until very recently, I believe, Ontario would indeed have thrown the Liberals out: first, because of the massive corruption, waste, and arrogance that had been exposed; and second, because they had tried to mask this with a remarkably hateful smear campaign against the opposition. The first might have cost them half their seats; the second would have cost them most of the rest. Instead, today, the second helped them recover from the first.
Here is the hard truth. The province of Ontario no longer has a small-c conservative hinterland. In riding after riding, and especially through the 60-plus ridings of its "golden horseshoe", anchored by Toronto since Confederation, the heart of English-speaking Canada something has happened akin to what happened in the city of Toronto, a generation before. Low birthrates, outward migration, and high immigration from non-traditional sources, have utterly transformed the political landscape.
-snip-
(Excerpt) Read more at davidwarrenonline.com ...
SOL?
S*** Outta' Luck.
We need a new Ronald Reagan.
All the best Canadians pine for the Great White North
in the USA.
Read, oh America, and beware!
The same can be said of America's big cities and suburbs... no-go territory for Republicans in much the same way Liberals dominate the big cities in Ontario and the belt around them. The only reason Republicans are competitive in America is cause flyover country has more Albertas than Ontarios in it.
At last, I thought that this election would be the one to turn things around. It's well known that they cannot continue to pay for more and more socialist programs, long-term problems with Quebec are still a dominant domestic theme, and Indian rights are going to be a greater problem as that population grows and ages. So when are thinking people in Canada going to wake-up to what their government's policies have wrought?
They didn't--and a poll today revealed that 60% of young people there think that Americans are evil. This doesn't bode well for our November election, nor for long-term relations with our better neighbor.
This is a very sad day for not only Canada but the continent.
Societies like Canada that were founded by a government tend to have low birthrates, confiscatory taxation, and a cradle to grave welfare state. America has been saved from being like Canada simply by consequence of being a nation that happened to have a government. It could very well become a Canada if its citizens lose faith in liberty and insist the government provide all their wants for them.
Much of the history of both Canada & America can be understood by looking at ancestry.
The reason New England has so many "liberals" is because it was settled by Royalists, Congregationalists, and Puritans. There were people with a strong sense of hierarchy. They believed an elite, either credentialed or hereditary, is entitled to rule and that everyone else should simply follow, as a flock would. They were very conformist, statist, and centralized. They viewed any dissent as heresy which needed to be suppressed.
Because of this heritage, New England today is very leftist, very politically correct, etc. It's why Massachusetts judges had no qualms about simply changing the long-standing definition of marriage by decree, without the slightest regard for public opinion.
The South was settled largely by rebellious types, such as the Scots-Irish, who distrust centralized power and elite claims of authority. Largely, people like we saw in Braveheart settled Dixie. So the South has always been conservative. Its people have always viewed tradition and established scripture as having more meaning than some contemporary elite concept of "social justice".
The rest of the country was settled by people closer to southerners in orientation than to New Englanders. It's why the vast heartland has traditionally been conservative (with a few exceptions, such as Scandinavian populated Minnesota & Wisconsin), and in turn why America has always been much more conservative than Europe.
Canada has always been more "liberal" than the U.S. because a greater percentage of its early settlers were sympathetic to Monarchy. They never had a revolution to throw the Monarchy out. Plus, they have a large French province. The western provinces are conservative, but out-voted due to their smaller population.
Immigration from the Third World is moving both America and Canada leftward. Toronto's conservative precincts have been obliterated by immigrant populations. California, once a mostly conservative state which went Republican in most presidential races, is now a leftist Democrat stronghold due to displacement of the state's traditional population by third worlders.
Third world immigrants do not have the same heritage as most Americans do. They come from societies where, traditionally, a few strongmen run things, corruption is taken as a given, peasants are bought off with a few handouts, governmental decisions are arbitrary and have no relation to public opinion, etc. If you came to America from a banana republic dictatorship, which party would remind you most of home and make you feel most comfortable? The Democrats, obviously.
Add to this the fact that the new immigrants are A) not encouraged to assimilate, B) are encouraged instead to retain their language and customs in a "multi-cultural" setting, and C) are taught that America has been an evil "racist" and "imperialist" nation, and it's no wonder that open borders will eventually kill the GOP and conservatism in America (and Canada).
An uneducated immigrant from Latin America would see rich, arrogant, elitist John Kerry as an Anglo carbon copy of the banana republic boss from back home. Kerry, in turn, sees the immigrant as a perfect "flock member", someone who will defer to his authority in return for some welfare handouts and affirmative action preferences. There is no equivalent of a Ronald Reagan in Third World politics, so Reagan type conservatism is something totally alien to most people coming from these nations.
This all explains why the Democrats threw open our borders with the 1965 Immigration Act. Republicans quietly deferred to it. The evil party/stupid party paradigm strikes again!
bump
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