Canadians are heading to the polls this Monday, May 2, 2011, for the fourth time in seven years. What seemed like a lot of sound and fury signifying nothing now looks set to seriously shake things up.
Although a multiparty system, Canadian elections have traditionally been contests between the right-of-center Conservatives – aka the Tories – (or their predecessors, the Canadian Alliance and the Progressive Conservatives) and the left-of-center Liberals. This time around, however, the Liberals, the party of prime ministers Mackenzie King and Pierre Trudeau, appear to be tanking. Current Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff’s lack of charisma certainly hasn’t helped, but neither has the lingering odor of scandal from when his party was last in power.
The Bloc Québécois (not to be confused with the provincial Parti Québécois) also seems to have lost ground. After 20 years in existence, voters in la belle province are finally becoming disenchanted with the separatist party.
This has paved the way for a surging Jack Layton, head of the perennially also-ran New Democratic Party. The left-wing NDP looks set to take second place, forming the official opposition for the first time in its 50-year history. If the Tories fail to win a majority, however, placing incumbent Prime Minister Stephen Harper atop a third straight minority government, it is not out of the question that Layton could become prime minister of an NDP-led coalition government should Harper prove unable to secure the confidence of Parliament.
What is at stake in this election? The Conservatives are running on their economic record. They have reduced the federal Goods and Services Tax from 7% to 5% and cut corporate taxes to 16.5%, with a further reduction to 15% planned by 2012. They also take credit for having steered the country through the recent global financial crisis with their stimulus spending, and plan to return to a balanced budget by 2014-2015.
The NDP, for its part, plans to subsidize the creation of childcare spaces, hire more police officers, train more doctors and nurses, establish a cap-and-trade system and commit to reducing greenhouse gas emissions, and transfer more money to provinces to help lower post-secondary tuition fees, to name just some of the spending they are promising. They plan to raise corporate taxes to 19.5% and balance the federal budget within four years, essentially the same time frame as the Tories.
The choice seems clear enough, then: lower taxes and controlled government spending to spur economic growth, or higher taxes and increased government spending. The Conservatives, though, in addition to drawing criticism from the left on crime and foreign policy, have not exactly energized fiscal hawks with their return to deficits, financial crisis or no.
As for the NDP, their ability to balance the budget while fulfilling all of their campaign promises has been met with much skepticism. Raising taxes, for one thing, could hurt economic growth, and therefore not bring in the extra revenue they expect. Areas of the country currently benefiting from the oil boom also chafe at the NDP’s anti-corporate, anti-fossil fuel stance.
Still, even if the rhetoric of their campaigns exaggerates their differences, the Conservatives and the NDP would lead the country in markedly different directions. On Monday, most Canadians seem set to vote for one or the other—and if the Liberal Party does as badly as the latest polls suggest, voters might just take part in a once-in-a-generation political realignment, too.
