Losing ticket
Dissatisfaction with "one-party democracy" could drive voters to bring Canada's government down, writes Aziza Sami from Montreal
The reversal of fortunes witnessed by Canada's new Liberal Prime Minister Paul Martin could augur an unexpected change of government. After less than three months in office Martin has been forced to defend his party from charges of corruption. On 10 February, Canada's Auditor General Sheila Fraser revealed that hundreds of millions of taxpayers' dollars had been mismanaged between 1997 and 2001, using such words as "scandalous" and "appalling" to describe the Liberal government's sponsorship programme designed to boost its profile in Quebec in the wake of the 1995 sovereignty referendum. Following Fraser's bombshell report, opinion polls showed a drastic drop in the Liberals' popularity to 36 per cent, down from 48 per cent just a few weeks ago.
The stakes of the recently formed Conservative Party -- which is slated to elect a leader on 20 March -- unexpectedly rose to 27 per cent, followed by the New Democratic Party at 17 per cent. If elections were held now, the polls indicate that 46 per cent of voters would choose Stephen Harper, a prominent Conservative who is a candidate for his party's leadership. To date, the Conservative Party, which was formed just last year from an amalgam of the Progressive Conservative and Alliance Parties, had appeared to pose no threat to the well-entrenched Liberals. At this point, however, the latter would be lucky if they were able to join as a minority party in a newly formed government.
The volte-face that occurred following the sponsorship scandal is not an outcome of that scandal alone, however. The Liberal Party, once famously led by the legendary Pierre Elliot Trudeau, has ruled uninterruptedly with a majority of parliamentary seats since 1993. Its recent success in gauging public sentiment on the Iraq war, in favour of multilateralism as opposed to the unilateralism espoused by the US, however, did not do much to assuage the long-standing criticism that the party's dominance in Canadian politics is turning the country's multi-party democratic system into a de facto "democratic dictatorship", or a "one-party state".
Under the popular and astute former Prime Minister Jean Chretien, Liberals displayed not only resilience but also a flexibility that allowed them to shift from initially right-wing social and economic policies to ones closer to the left-of- centre. Critics say that Liberals have thus perpetuated the status quo in their own favour. Under the leadership of business tycoon Martin, who is also credited as having been one of the most successful ministers of finance the country had during the Chretien government, expectations were that the party would move closer towards political and fiscal conservatism.
Now, however, the revelations of financial misdemeanour, to which Chretien and Martin might have turned a blind eye, seem to have become the benchmark against which voters will judge the future performance of the party. A dramatic shift might take place as early as next April; the date initially set by Martin for federal elections. Martin had promised to bring a new vigour to Canadian politics and to reinstate "its great energy and enthusiasm". Now his energy appears to have been diverted to warding off the suspicions of misconduct that he could be faced with as the former minister of finance. The prime minister is oscillating between on the one hand wanting to appear that he is tackling corruption head on, and, on the other hand, playing down the sponsorship scandal, as his sharper predecessor Chretien might have done. If he succeeds in overcoming the scandal he could then move on to implementing an ambitious agenda including the establishment of warmer ties with the US, strengthening the Canadian Armed Forces and curtailing public spending and services.
It is also reported that Martin is under pressure from his party not to undertake -- as he had promised -- a public judicial inquiry into the sponsorship scandal. This could give rise to even more discontent against a government which has been perceived as stalling on investigations of other matters of public concern, such as the deportation and reported torture in a Syrian prison of Canadian-Syrian citizen Maher Arar, alleged controversial grants directed to Martin's shipping company and the review of Canada's current defence and foreign policy.
In the longer term there is also a demand for reforming the current voting system known as the "first-past-the-post" system, where the winner of a relative majority wins a seat in parliament. This system, allege its critics, favours only the major parties, denying many voters their right to representation. They thus advocate replacing it with a system of proportional representation where "one voice equals one vote".
"There is a hunger to move beyond the old, tired ways of doing things," Martin told those attending a public meeting last May, when he was incumbent prime minister. He was referring to his ousted rival Chretien. It is ironic that this very maxim is now being applied to him and to the party that brought him to power.
