How the Liberals came right up the middle

Now that we no longer have to worry about being so meticulously fair, or about saying anything that might prejudice the outcome, let's have another look at what happened in the federal election.

Nothing at least on the surface that a large chunk of the electorate didn't want and an even larger chunk didn't expect: a change of political tone and government.

The campaign started with a toss-up between three parties, too unCanadian to last. It camedown to a more conventional race between two parties. By the simple mechanism of electoral elimination, one more had to go.

And that's all there was to it, besides the shows the leaders put up.

There was Tom Mulcair's unctuous friendliness under such markedly unfriendly circumstances.

There was Justin Trudeau, getting more and more comfortable in his political skin.

There was Stephen Harper, continuing to hide behind his crocodile smile.

Below those surfaces, however, there was a lot else on the go.

Driftingright

The drift to the political right, for example, that's already played itself out in many other Western democracies.

Darrell Bricker and John Ibbitson brought it to the attention of Canadians in their 2013 book The Big Shift. They described what they saw as a "seismic change" in Canadian politics.

In their search for a cause, they identified a new wave of immigrants more in tune with conservative than liberal values.
There have been other suggestions.

In a 2014 panel discussion, political scientist Leo Panitch and commentator/author Yves Engler talked about a creep of U.S. neo-conservative thinking into Canadian politics.

In his book "Harperism" of the same year, media expert Donald Gutstein of Simon Fraser University argued that the shift was driven by neo-liberal think-tanks.

Scott Henning, a self-appointed champion for taxpayers, spotted a more natural trend brought on by a voting population that's simply ageing.

More recently, the current Ottawa bureau chief of Maclean'sJohn Geddes singled out election tactics by the Liberals and the NDP trying to outflank each other.

More to it

Maybe there was a bit of all of the above, and maybe even more.

Let's start with the NDP.

Socialism was originally created to benefit the working class. But as a political ideology it was, and arguably still is, a product of bourgeois intellectuals and their ruminations on equality and the magic power of solidarity.

Mulcair's repeated appeals to the Canadian middle class to open its arms to the NDP was a clear statement that he wanted to bring socialism home, now that the spectre of inequality is spreading into the middle as well.

After that, it's just a matter of political geography: crossing over to the middle class from the working class is a move to the right.

The Liberals, on the other hand, didn't have to move at all.

Like socialism, liberalism emerged from the middle class; unlike socialism, it stayed there.

Its motto is freedom freedom from oppression and deprivation on the one hand; freedom to pursue opportunity and prosperity on the other.

If Trudeau promised to spend where Mulcair said he wouldn't, he wasn't crossing anywhere. He was simply pledging to do what the Liberals have been doing as long as they've been around - staying in the middle while taking bits and pieces from the right and the left when necessary.

And then there's conservatism.

It's really an older version of liberalism, but with something of a split personality which looks forward economically while looking backward socially.

Big universal ideas like equality and freedom, so important to liberals and socialists, are viewed with suspicion by conservatives lest they strip people of their uniqueness.

Everybody knows what great benefits the social systems of modern society have to offer; everybody also knows what they can take when they turn people into files and numbers.

Conservatism is political cottage country,where you have both your comforts and your independence.

So let's get one thing straight. Harper didn't drag Canada towards the right.

He didn't have to because it was already going there with the rest of the world. But, like a good neo-liberal, he saw an opportunity to put his own far-right ideas into practice.

Canadian voters told him in no uncertain terms that he went too far.