There is an interesting television contest here in Canada. It’s called Canada’s Next Great Prime Minister. People between the ages of 18 and 25 are asked to submit a five-minute Youtube presentation in which they address one current political issue. Ten finalists are chosen, and brought to a “political boot camp”. From these, four are selected to be voted on by the audience. They not only present their views, but are subjected to an intense grilling from a panel of three former Canadian Prime Ministers and one Provincial Premier (yes, in Canada, Prime Ministers appear on game shows, and even on comedy skit shows). There is a $50,000 prize.
The show was on last night, with four finalists. These included Pam Hrick, an Ottawa University student politician, in second place; Rahim Moloo, a lawyer from Calgary, Alberta in third place; and Kevin Royal, a business school graduate from Waterloo, Ontario, in fourth. Pam Hrick held the lead in balloting until she was displaced by the audience’s response to the final speeches. The winner was Alika Lafontaine, a 25-year-old Métis physician from Saskatchewan.
It tells something of the seriousness with which this was approached that one of the Judges, former Prime Minister Paul Martin, grew visibly angry when Lafontaine answered “yes” to the question of whether he would accede to a referendum for Quebec separation that won by a majority of only 900 votes (presuming numerous recounts). Lafontaine was flustered, but he stuck to his guns. But what is most remarkable is that Lafontaine had chosen for his focus, not the predictable economic nostrums that the others had chosen, but aboriginal representation and justice issues. It hinted at something which I have always suspected, which is that Canadians, when push comes to shove, care most about fairness and justice. They care about bread-and- butter issues, too, of course. But a perceived chronic injustice bothers them, nags at their conscious, and will make itself felt in political decisions.
The show clearly demonstrated some specific characteristics of Canadian politics that I’ve long been aware of. When we step into a voting booth, we have little interest in the following subjects: 1) race, 2) gender, 3) religion, 4) sexuality. They just don’t come up as topics in Canadian political debates, and nobody seems interested in them in any political context. I have never met any Canadian who voted for a candidate on the basis of the candidate’s religious beliefs, and few Canadians have any idea of what religious denominations their elected officials belong to. Gender is a non-issue. Sex doesn’t enter the picture. Openly gay candidates don’t seem to have any trouble getting elected. Unlike in the U.K. or the United States, I can’t think of any “sex scandals” in Canadian Politics. We simply don’t care about the sex lives of our politicians, if they have any. It’s just something we never think about. Race, the big bugaboo south of the border, doesn’t enter the political calculus. Have you ever heard anyone in the Canadian media speculating on whether such and such a party or such and such a politician was doing well or poorly in some division of what the Americans coily call “demographics”? I can’t think of a single case. No party has any obvious appeal to anyone on the basis of their “race”, a word which is more or less meaningless to most Canadians. Canadian politics is almost always discussed in terms of regional issues and regional loyalties. A politician worries about whether he’s doing well in the West, or Quebec, Ontario, or the Maritimes, or in urban or rural settings, There is not even much of a “class” angle in our politics. The Conservatives, whose policies favor upper income voters, still depend more on a regional base than an income level one to get elected. The New Democratic Party has never succeeded in winning even a local election on “class” issues, The Liberals have always found their support across the full income range, and the Bloc is specifically and exclusively a regional party.
This doesn’t mean that Canadian politics isn’t full of stupidities. I can name any number of issues in which our political culture is profoundly frustrating. Like people anywhere, we repeat the same mistakes over and over again, and drag our history around with us like a muskrat dragging a trap on its tail. But it is a different set of frustrations, and a different set of stupidities than those that plague our neighbour to the south, or in the U. K.
Lafontaine won over the audience by addressing one of those old sores from the past that has lingered, unsolved, for generations: the democratic shortfall in aboriginal self-government, where a number of Canadians live without proper and responsible representation. A century of paternalistic intervention has left many small communities with a kind of ludicrous parody of normal self-government, and no economic viability. This situation is stupid and unjust, and everyone knows it. There are some vested interests who will stall or block any reform (some within, and some without the communities involved), but most of us would like to see the matter settled. This issue only directly affects a very small percentage of Canadians. But here, the national instinct for fairness shows itself. It does not matter that only a few people are treated unjustly, it only matters that the injustice exists. This is a healthy attitude.
Actually, I don’t agree with Lafontaine’s proposed policy solution. I would prefer a different approach. But his successful presentation shows that the Canadian public does not consist of a bunch of self-centered yahoos who will vote only to protect their own personal financial positions, or in alignment with some tribal loyalty, or because someone presses buttons on a control board of idiotic prejudices and slogans.
It means that we may have our problems, but we are fundamentally healthy. We can deal with the challenges that history throws at us.
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