David Warren: Fear Wins (Canadian Conservatives are now well and truly SOL)

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My own (unpublished) prediction guessed the result almost exactly, except with the Conservative and Liberal parties reversed.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.

My husband loves visiting Canada on an annual basis--but I'm sick of the taxes that we have to pay for the privilege. I am also sickened by the willingness of Canadians to live in a hemisphere which is safer for them because of their proximity to the US, but is unsafer for us because of their unwillingness to help preserve freedom in the world (not to mention their "loose" border policy which allows terrorists to slip through to the US).

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.

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!

Fear Wins - David Warren

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.

Where I had expected Ontario to largely revert to historic voting patterns, given a superannuated Liberal government coming to pieces, and a Conservative opposition that had come together, it did not revert. In riding after riding which Tories used to win, even when they were running an iguana, the Grits were now romping home by wide margins.

Toronto itself was once "Toronto the blue" -- and remained, well into the 1960s, "WASP", and mostly Tory, not only by inheritance but also by cultural assimilation of fresh immigrant arrivals. The transformation began in the middle of Toronto, and worked concentrically outwards.

Curiously, the Toronto-born Stephen Harper almost perfectly reflects that old Ontario profile (what I call the "Inner Leaside") in his outlook and mannerisms. He is not the kind of person who could possibly frighten anyone who used to live around here. And as recently as 1995, it was still possible for a provincial party as that of Mike Harris to sweep into power, surfing the older Ontario demographics of what has been called the "905 belt".

No longer. "Main Street" was transformed into "suburbia" without a huge immediate change in values and outlook; but then suddenly urban, suburban, and semi-urban southern Ontario passed a tipping point, into what I call the "Mall Culture". What I mean by this is a kind of deracinated multi-ethnic hodgepodge, genuinely lacking core values, a common outlook, or a proprietary sense about the political order -- and therefore easily responsive to the passing suggestions of media and mass culture. Or to put it another way, the sort of people who can be easily herded, using the cynical methods the Liberal Party employs; and who, as Dalton McGuinty has discovered, quickly forgive and forget when politicians tell them huge lies.

Alberta, by contrast, represents today something like what Ontario used to be. It is not the old Ontario that is shocked by Alberta. It is the new Ontario that is so easily shocked; and alienated from its own former nature.

Jane Jacobs's recent book, Dark Age Coming, looks upon what I think the same scene from a more "liberal", and universal standpoint. A coming demographic bulge of baby-boom retirees will radically destabilize a society in which most stabilizing influences are already tottering. Mrs. Jacobs mentions the breakdown of family, the decline of higher education, the growth of pseudo-science, confiscatory taxation, the loss of self-regulation in professions and trades.

She is describing the rest of the new Ontario.

__________________

Quid.....same thing for David Warren articles....not on the list...I too am very disappointed about the Conservative loss....being here in Ontario, I am beside myself on how these Ontarians can get it WRONG every time in the elections!

Quidnunc,

There you go again....

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FReegards,

ConservativeStLouisGuy

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