This past Monday, enough Canadians came together to reconfigure our political map.
The contours of the new one are still fluid, but in time, with another election, the emergent shapes might acquire stability.
For now, the election results reveal a divide in the new Canada, and also a new hope for healing the old wounds of national unity.
The country is somewhat divided along urban-rural (or urban-suburban) lines. Residents of Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver held back from voting for Conservatives, but could not entirely deny the pressures for change building in the nation’s heartland.
It is as if the “sophisticates” in the cities, ever suspicious of the country “hicks” (the elitists’ label, not mine) remained dismissive of Conservatives.
The “sophisticates” worried about such issues as revisiting same-sex marriage, the Kyoto protocol on climate change and the undermining of Canada’s “values”—as shaped and protected by Liberals in Ottawa.
They worried less about the odour of Liberal corruption that made the political atmosphere unbearable, and they were more readily persuaded by fearmongering on the part of a government that had lost its moral compass.
But the “hicks,” having toiled and fought for their country, and being less reliant on what passes for wisdom as noise made by the “sophisticates,” went ahead to vote for change.
The hicks lanced the boil. It was painful, but healing.
And as the accumulated filth of our political system gets drained—a necessary exercise that must be done with some regularity—health will likely be restored by the vigour of a new party bearing fresh ideas and energy.
Elections in a democracy can be therapeutic. The benefits of the therapy administered by the “hicks” this week are palpable.
Western alienation, which threatened to become a more pronounced disorder in our politics, was decisively punctured.
Canada has a Conservative government and a prime minister-elect from Alberta. Success and failure will now rest with this government’s performance and not on blaming Central Canadians or Maritimers if it stumbles.
Quebec alienation, deepened by resentment against Liberal orthodoxy on the nature of Canadian federalism, had led Quebecers to increasingly flirt with sovereignty. This cast a gloom across the country and bred cynicism and mistrust.
But then the “hicks” voted and made Conservatives a viable federalist alternative to the corrupt Liberals in Quebec. All of a sudden the sovereignty movement looks like the bluff it had always been, an option that fed on resentment and can be drained of its vitality by negotiating a kind of federalism more appealing to Quebecers and the rest of Canada.
Eventually, perhaps Albertans and sufficient numbers of Quebecers can devise—over the heads of Toronto “sophisticates”—a new and durable majority.
Such a political realignment could be the start of the long-awaited shift in Canadian politics towards the West—the Pacific basin—where clearly the power and influence in world economy will be located with the expected rise of China and India.
We have seen over the past quarter-century a similar movement in American politics, consistent with the evolving global economy moving from the Atlantic basin to the Pacific.
In time, we might look back at this election as a watershed moment in our country’s history—when the “hicks” proved to be wiser than their city cousins.
He is a member of the Board of Directors for the Center for Islamic Pluralism based in Washington, D.C., a Senior Fellow with the Canadian Coalition for Democracies, and an academic-consultant with the Center for Security Policy in Washington, D.C. He has been a consultant with CIDA on development issues and has published widely in academic journals on foreign policy matters and area studies of the Middle East and South Asia.
Mansur is featured on the documentary Obsession: Radical Islam's War Against the West produced by the David Horowitz Freedom Center. He also unsuccessfully ran for the Canadian Alliance party in 2000.
Mansur has been accused by Canadian Islamic Congress of using "provocative, self-serving rhetoric", and for "promoting an anti-Arab and anti-Muslim agenda".
He is an Ismaili Muslim.
At a press conference on October 2, 2008, Mansur stated that "Islam is my private life, my conscience...[but] my faith does not take precedence over my duties...to Canada and its constitution, which I embrace freely;" "I am first and most importantly a Canadian;" "only in a free society will you find Islam as a faith and not a political religion." Mansur also criticized New Democratic Party Leader Jack Layton, whom Mansur said "has gone to bed with Islamists", because he is running candidates in Ontario and Quebec who are closely identified with the push for Sharia law.
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