Conservative Blues

It’s two days after the big federal election here in Canada, and as the dust settles, some voting patterns are starting to emerge. Most of them are pretty standard stuff, like the majority of seats in Quebec went to separatists (oops, I mean sovereigntists – that really sounds so much less confrontational), and the party based in Alberta swept Alberta. But, the pattern making most of the headlines in Canada, and dominating water cooler conversations everywhere, is this – the right wing conservative party (that won a minority government) didn’t win a single seat in any of Canada’s three largest cities. That’s right, no Conservatives in Montreal, Toronto or Vancouver.

So, what does this mean? I’ve heard all sorts of theories, from “city folk are too intellectual to be suckered in by the Conservatives and their hidden agenda”, to “only people in small communities are naïve enough to buy in to the GST reduction scheme.”

I have a different theory, and it goes something like this: Canada is not all that different from the USA. We Canadians like to wallow in our smug state of condescendence as we gaze to the south and claim cerebral superiority over our neighbors. Well guess what folks? It ain’t so.

We all laughed at the map of the US, with all that red in the middle and a strip of blue down either side. We sent around copies of the front page from England’s Daily Mirror with a headline asking “How could 90 some-odd million Americans be so stupid?” It was all great fun.

So Canada, the shoe is now firmly on the other foot, and although Stephen Harper is not exactly George Dubya (at least we hope not), there are still some striking similarities. He opposes bans on handguns, he’s against gay marriage and abortion, and there’s that little thing about how if he had been leading the country several short years ago, our troops would be dieing over in Iraq “defending freedom”. At least we know that our governing party would have been praying for them.

About the only difference I see at the moment is that Canada, just to be different, has labeled the left red, and the right blue. So now that map of “The United States of Canada vs. Jesusland” is all screwed up. I suppose we call the left red because it is closer to pinko, as in commie. And I suppose they call the right red because it’s, well, right, and that has a nice ring to it. Either way, if they adopted our color scheme (or we adopted theirs), the result would be the same. Jesusland just got a whole lot bigger!