I mention the Overton Window in the title of this blog and it is important to understand this concept to follow what comes later. Here is an American explainer video. Remember that in US politics the colours are reversed. Red is conservative, blue is progressive. Here is an explanation from the Canadian perspective.
On May 1, 2020, CPC MP Pierre Poilievre posted this, suggesting that the Liberal government's banning of military-style firearms in Canada is a far-left move.
To clarify, there is very little "far-left ideology" present in Canadian politics. The Communist Party of Canada (the original CPC) has elected exactly 1 MP, in 1945.
The CCF (later NDP) was/is? a party based on social democratic values which include universal healthcare, the right for workers to organise to have the power to enter into negotiations with employers to ensure a living wage and safe work conditions, equal opportunities for all children to receive a good education, universal suffrage (every adult gets a vote), and inclusiveness of all people, regardless of gender, race, religion, sexual orientation, etc. There is also a strong belief in a safe and well-governed society, which includes restrictions on activities which are not in the public good or which adversely affect public safety. Things like gun control, banning drunk driving, encouraging the use of seatbelts and car seats and motorcycle helmets, and banning substances like asbestos that make people gravely ill.
Social democratic principles are supported by many Canadians. However, there is a long-standing campaign from the right to equate the CCF/NDP with communism. They would have you believe that support for the NDP is support for bread lines and confiscation of personal property and multiple families forced to live together in drab grey Soviet-style apartment complexes. They maintain that the NDP support Maoist re-education camps and internment of political dissidents.
This is a load of codswallop.
Social democratic principles are about raising everyone in society to have a good standard of living. It is opposed to the accumulation of vast wealth and huge wealth inequalities. In other words, social democratic principles would see the rich taxed fairly and crack down on wealth-hiding, and make corporations pay their fair share.
It should already be clear why those on the right hate this way of thinking so much.
Social democratic principles are humanist principles. They put human beings before profit. This is a sharp contrast with the right, particularly those in the US who are outright declaring that they are ok with thousands of people dying from COVID-19 in order to get the stock market back up.
A Bit of History
In the past, there were more similarities than differences between the Conservatives and the Liberals. Both were very accommodating to big business. Both were fairly hard on the poor, people of colour, LGBTQ+ individuals, etc. The Conservatives were a bit right of centre, the Liberals were a bit left of centre. This is why the old saw "Liberal, Tory, same old story" was very popular with people who did not like others encouraging people to vote. It minimised the differences between the parties.
Things began to change while Pierre Elliot Trudeau was Prime Minister. The elder Trudeau was more of a humanist, believing that government had "no place in the bedrooms of the nation" and repealing laws that discriminated against the LGBTQ2+ community.
The change really jumped into high gear when Stephen Harper and his Reform Party (led at the time by Preston Manning) came on the scene.
"The Reform Party called for the privatization of various government services that the party believed could be better provided by the private sector. These government services included a number of state-owned corporations including Canada Post, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, and Petro Canada. The Reform Party suggested that Canada's government-funded universal health insurance system be replaced by a two-tier private and public health insurance system. Preston Manning asserted however that the Reform Party was committed to ensuring that all Canadians would be able to access health insurance and health services."The Reform Party called for major changes in the federal government's relations with Aboriginal peoples, which included dismantling the Department of Indian Affairs and transferring its responsibilities directly to Aboriginal governing bodies to lessen Aboriginal peoples' dependence on the federal government.(In other words, they wanted out of the treaties)
The Reform Party strongly opposed extending marriage rights to gays and lesbians. Many members of the Reform Party saw homosexuality as a moral wrong. Reform leader Preston Manning himself once publicly stated that "homosexuality is destructive to the individual, and in the long run, society".
The party was also known to have suggested a potential return to capital punishment, the only party in Canada to have done so.
The Reform Party advocated an immigration policy based solely on the economic needs of Canada.[28] Reform's early policy proposals for immigration were seen as highly controversial in Canada including a policy pamphlet called Blue Sheet that was issued in mid-1991 stating that Reformers opposed "any immigration based on race or creed or designed to radically or suddenly alter the ethnic makeup of Canada".[29] The statement was considered too controversial and subsequent Reform Party policy documents did not declare any similar concern for a radical alteration of the ethnic make-up of Canada.[30] However this controversy and others raised the question over whether Reform was intolerant to non-white people and whether the party harboured racist members.[30] Subsequent repeated accounts of xenophobic and racist statements by individual Reform party supporters and members spread this concern, though the party itself continuously denied that it supported such views.[25]
The Reform Party declared its opposition to existing government-funded and sponsored bilingualism and multiculturalism.[30] Reformers claimed that efforts to create a bilingual country had not worked and that language policy should be a provincial issue. Reformers criticized government-sponsored multiculturalism for creating a "hyphenated Canadian" identity, rather than a single Canadian identity.[31]
The Reform Party was founded as a western-based populist party to promote reform of democratic institutions. However, shortly after the 1987 founding convention, social and fiscal conservatives became dominant within the party, moving it to the right. Their political aims were a reduction in government spending on social programs, and reductions in taxation. Though largely a fringe party in 1987, by 1990 the party had made huge inroads in public support as support for Mulroney's PC party dropped due to the unpopular Goods and Services Tax (GST), high unemployment, and the failure of the Meech Lake Accord. In 1992, leader Preston Manning released a book called The New Canada explaining the origins of the new party and its policies, explaining his personal life and convictions, and defending some of the controversial elements of Reform's policies. (from Wikipedia)
The Reform Party was founded as a western-based populist party to promote reform of democratic institutions. However, shortly after the 1987 founding convention, social and fiscal conservatives became dominant within the party, moving it to the right. Their political aims were a reduction in government spending on social programs, and reductions in taxation. Though largely a fringe party in 1987, by 1990 the party had made huge inroads in public support as support for Mulroney's PC party dropped due to the unpopular Goods and Services Tax (GST), high unemployment, and the failure of the Meech Lake Accord. In 1992, leader Preston Manning released a book called The New Canada explaining the origins of the new party and its policies, explaining his personal life and convictions, and defending some of the controversial elements of Reform's policies. (from Wikipedia)
Then they became the Canadian Alliance Party and went from a western-based party to a national party. In 2003 the Canadian Alliance Party and the Progressive Conservative Party merged, thanks to Peter MacKay (yes, the one who is now trying to lead the CPC). MacKay sold out the Progressive Conservative Party and allowed the Reform/Canadian Alliance Party to take over, driving out many "Red Tories".
Enter Stephen Joseph Harper. Harper was one of the founding members of the Reform Party. He went on to head the National Citizens Coalition, an entity created in 1967 for the express purpose of dismantling the then brand-new Canada Health Act which guaranteed health care to all Canadians regardless of ability to pay. This is a core value Harper has brought with him from one organisation to another.
In 2003 he became the first leader of the Conservative Party of Canada (CPC) which emerged from the merger of the Canadian Alliance and the PCs. As soon as Harper became Leader of the Official Opposition in Ottawa, Stephen Harper began to work to shift Canada to the right. He used language to try to change the way Canadians view the world. He and his party talked about "special interest groups" and "environmentalists" in a pejorative fashion. He vilified "Big Union Bosses" and "activist judges". He encouraged Canadians to think with their guts and ignore "academic elites", i.e. experts who have been highly educated and devoted their careers to learning all they can about a particular subject. He employed methodology laid out by Arthur Finkelstein, the communications guru who helped to get 3 US Republican Presidents elected as well as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The CPC have been in continual campaign mode and attack mode since their inception, lowering the bar on advertising and political dialogue to hateful and often misleading levels. Most importantly, Harper worked hard at making "Liberal" a dirty word.
Harper was PM for almost a decade. The dark ages as some of us like to call it. Here is something of a list of the things he did while PM, including destroying research libraries, eliminating the long form census, ignoring Canadians in trouble abroad if they were non-white, ignoring First Nations issues, and opening the door to provincial governments to bring in two-tiered health care.
Current Situation
The CPC has moved far to the right of the old PCs. People used to say that both parties want what is good for Canadians, they just have different ideas of how to get there. This is no longer true, but many people have not yet realised it. Indeed, Stephen Harper's disdain for Canada and Canadians is well documented.
The CPC, now led by Andrew Scheer, continues to push to normalize things that would have been widely condemned as heartless, cruel and un-Canadian before 2003. He and his party support loosening, not tightening gun laws. They support making university funding contingent on allowing far right speakers at least an equal platform on university campuses. They are heavily funded and supported by anti-abortion groups and would, if in power, seek to ban abortions eventually. They would follow in Stephen Harper's footsteps and expand draconian sentencing that disproportionately harms vulnerable people and members of minorities, possibly with an eye to opening up Canada for American prison industrial complex business. The CPC are vigorously anti-union and anti-worker. The CPC support home schooling and private religious education while endorsing cuts to public education.
So, the CPC is further to the right than the old PC Party ever was. The Liberals, under Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, are somewhat further to the left of previous Liberal parties, embracing a humanist approach that coincides with a general shift in Canadian society that has been going on since the 1960s. But the CPC, with the help of much of the Canadian media, has been pushing hard to make centre look left, and left of centre look extremist.
And yet, a vast majority of Canadians support the new gun ban. Despite all the hard work by the CPC to try to make us meaner and greedier and more self-centred, Canadians still care about others.
So, no, Mr. Poilievre, this is not far-left policy. This is in line with what most Canadians want. And it was part of the Liberal campaign platform in 2019, so it is not just a reactionary response to the Nova Scotia mass shooting.
