VANCOUVER (ResourceInvestor.com) -- Canadians vote today to elect a new federal government. If the polls are accurate, the ruling Conservative Party, led by Prime Minister Steven Harper, will once again win enough seats to form a government. It appears unlikely, however, that it will be able to form a majority government, something the party has long wished for.
Because resource industries fall under provincial jurisdiction in Canada, the results of the election will not have a direct impact on mining, forestry or petroleum extraction.
There is likely to be an indirect effect, however, because a minority government distracted by partisan squabbling in Parliament will be constricted in its ability to take all the necessary monetary and fiscal steps necessary to enable Canada to weather the financial and economic storms that are blowing through the world.
Prime Minister Steven Harper called the election on 7 September with an eye to winning re-election before an economic downturn that was expected to hit some time in 2009. The timing of the election was sufficiently propitious that an electoral majority, which had eluded the Conservatives when they beat the Liberals in 2005, seemed to be within reach. The Conservatives had been preparing for this election for a long time and had their ducks lined up well in advance.
In the French-speaking province of Quebec, where the Conservatives needed to pick up seats if it were to win a majority, the party was up against Gilles Duceppe's Bloc Quebecois. The Bloc has been originally formed to fight for Quebec separation from Canada, but Quebec voters had lost their taste for independence, the party was way down in the polls and Duceppe was reportedly thinking of retiring from politics.
The opposition Liberals likewise seemed to be easy pickings. Their marquee program, a proposal for a carbon tax called the Green Shift, was so complicated and difficult to explain that the Liberals quietly put it on the back-burner. Their leader, mildly mannered Quebec academic Stephane Dion, spoke English with difficulty and presided over a party that had been suffering from deep internal divisions for years.
The Conservatives got an unexpected boost from the New Democratic Party, which ran a very strong campaign. If the NDP could split the left-leaning vote, the Conservatives stood an excellent chance of winning their long-desired majority. Leader Jack Layton announced at the beginning of the campaign that he was running for Prime Minister, which made it difficult to dismiss his social democrats as a bunch of wild-eyed socialists, which it often was in the past. There was even speculation the NDP could form the next opposition when it released a platform built around a promise to reverse $50 billion in corporate tax cuts and use the revenue to fund new social programs and public transit.
But then the financial and economic storm hit, resulting in failed bank bailouts, crashing stock markets, falling oil prices and a collapsing Canadian dollar. Support for the Conservative began to go south, too. But the party's fall from grace wasn't just the result of bad luck. Some of its reversal of fortune can be blamed on the party and its leader.
Although Harper is second to none as a political strategist, he is a rank beginner in the arts of retail politics. When the Conservatives reallocated $45 million in arts funding during the campaign, the move was immediately jumped on by the Bloc and the Quebec media and repositioned as an attack against what the province believes to be its unique culture. A proposal to crack down on youth crime was popular in English-speaking Canada, but was seen in Francophone Quebec as repressive and more evidence that the Conservatives were out of touch with Quebec's more permissive values. Finally, when Dion blew the opening of an English-language TV interview, the Conservatives unwisely pounced on his gaffe and derided it as evidence of his unfitness to lead, which some interpreted as evidence that the Conservatives were really as mean-spirited as many Canadians feared they were.
Although it is possible that over the Thanksgiving long weekend enough Canadians have decided to cast their vote for the Liberals to enable them to win the election, the more likely outcome is that the Conservatives will win another minority. Unfortunately for Harper, too many Canadians fear he has a secret, Bush-style right-wing agenda that he will unleash on the country if he wins a majority. The likelihood that Canada will have a Conservative minority, and not a Liberal government, will be increased if the Canadian stock and credit markets, which were closed Monday for Thanksgiving, follow the the markets in the U.S. and Europe upward on Tuesday.
