Popular to the end
Mark Steyn - Monday,5 June 2006
Stephen Harper's "approval ratings" are, generally speaking, twice those of George W. Bush. That's to say, the prime minister's are in the mid-sixties, and the president's are in the low thirties, if not lower. I don't pretend to any expertise in what this particular indicator actually indicates. It would not surprise me if this November Bush's numbers were down somewhere between the Janjaweed and the Ebola virus and yet the Republicans still managed to hold the House and pick up a couple of Senate seats--just as throughout the nineties president Clinton had indestructible "approval ratings" and all that happened was that the Democrats lost the House, lost the Senate, lost state legislatures, lost governors' mansions, and eventually lost the White House, too.
On the other hand, Mr. Harper is not the first to discover that you can be dismissed one year as a man Canadians will never trust with the prime minister's office and next year they're entirely at ease with you in the job. It's amazing what an audience with the Governor General and getting chauffeured back to the House of Commons will do for how "prime ministerial" you seem--especially when your predecessor was the exception to the rule: standing next to da liddle guy from Shawinigan for a decade, Paul Martin seemed effortlessly prime ministerial, until he got to Sussex Drive and shrivelled with every day in office.
But the question is: what do you want to be apart from liked? Over in Berlin, Angela Merkel presides over a rickety incoherent national coalition and yet also has high approval ratings--because she's abandoned any attempt at serious reform of Germany's arthritic statism. Everything she does is hugely popular as long as she does nothing.
I doubt Stephen Harper will make that mistake. He's what I would call a principled incrementalist: that's to say, he may move cautiously, but he moves and in the right direction. He has no desire to be this decade's Brian Mulroney. Furthermore, if you're a conservative government in a profoundly unconservative culture, you can't just follow the approval numbers. If you do, you'll wind up like Frau Merkel, winning approval only for abandoning your beliefs. Anyone can be liked for being likable. What counts for conservatives is whether they still like you when you're being conservative. For a quarter-century south of the border, slick consultants advised Republican candidates to finesse their position on abortion because the public supported "a woman's right to choose." A lot of "moderate" Republicans did, and so did formerly pro-life Democrats like Al Gore. Those conservative candidates who declined to go along with the centrist trimming have seen the electorate gradually move towards them--to the point where today it's the Democrats who are stuck with the unsaleable position and forced to obfuscate like crazy, like John Kerry in 2004. Abortion absolutism is now a net loser for Democrats. Similarly, before Mrs. Thatcher and Sir Keith Joseph came up with it, it would never have occurred to the British electorate that "council flats"--public housing--could be sold and the state's tenants transformed into property owners. Now it would seem preposterous to suggest that large proportions of the population be housed by the government. The Conservative party changed the terms of the debate. Indeed, the wider cause of Thatcherite "privatization" was taken up not just in Britain but across post-Communist eastern Europe, too.
There are times when politicians have to lead, and this is one of them. In Europe at the moment, the political class is paralyzed: in Germany, Frau Merkel is in office but not in power; in France, a modest start to long overdue employment-law reform was brought down by a mob concerned only to protect its short-term interests. And so course correction that should have begun a decade back gets postponed for another year or two, or five, ensuring only that it will be all the more painful when it begins.
In Canada, where we're wedded as much as the Continentals to a cobwebbed conventional wisdom, the siren song beckoning the Tories is very potent: c'mon, it says, we all know that the electorate just wants Liberal government without the Liberals--more money on health care, no change on Kyoto, troops out of anywhere George W. Bush wants them to be, et cetera. The Tories can do just fine managing the Liberal state more "efficiently," or at any rate less corruptly. You don't have to look hard to find takers for this seductive pitch--Peter MacKay falls for it as easily as he fell for Belinda, and it's likely to wind up much the same way, too. Posterity will judge the Conservative party on their success at shifting the electorate.
For example, most anyone who seriously looks at the issue understands that the present health care system cannot be "saved" in any meaningful sense, and that even "fixing it for a generation"--i.e., the next half-decade--is less and less viable given the underlying trends. That being so, unless the Canadian political class wants to find itself at the mercy of Paris-style mobs a decade down the round, they need to put the issues on the table now. Across the developed world, we're at the beginning of the end of the social democratic state. Between now and 2040, the elderly will increase in Japan from 24 per cent of the population to 44.7 per cent, in Spain from 22 per cent to 45.5 per cent, in Italy from 25 per cent to 46.2 per cent. As a general rule, the Anglosphere--Britain, Australia, Canada, America--is in less worse shape than the Continentals, but look at the figures closely. In 2000, oldsters formed 16.3 per cent of the U.S. population and 17 per cent of Canada's. In 2040, they'll form 26 per cent of the U.S. population and 33.3 per cent of Canada's--i.e., we're aging faster than the Americans.
Take the "aged dependency ratio"--the number of elderly people receiving state benefits relative to the working-age adults slogging away each day to pay for them. In 2000, America, Australia and Canada all had 0.26 seniors for every working stiff. In 2040, America will have 0.47 seniors for every worker, Australia 0.56, Canada 0.63--i.e., we'll have a lot fewer young Canadians to stick with the bill for increased geriatric care. Aging societies are a global phenomenon but with a wide disparity of effects: by 2040, state benefits to the old will comprise 33.1 per cent of GDP in Spain and 32 per cent in Italy against 16.6 per cent in Australia and 17.6 per cent in the United Kingdom. Canada is an in-betweeny sorta nation on these projections--22.9 per cent. But that's still potentially catastrophic, for the health system and much else.
What to do? In The Globe and Mail, John Ibbitson says hey, no problem, let's just do what we've been doing for years, only more so. Or as the Globe headline put it: "Canada's Future Rests With Open-Door Immigration." But just because you leave the door open doesn't mean the folks you want are going to come through it. Hard-working talented young immigrants will be at a premium in the years ahead, and there aren't many compelling reasons for them to come here and pay tax rates of 60, 65 per cent or whatever it'll be by then to fund the swollen state liabilities cooked up in the seventies and eighties. So "open-door immigration" will likely result mostly in "family reunification"--an endless thread of elderly mums, dads, aunts, uncles, grandparents that does nothing to reduce our age imbalance. If our future "rests with" open-door immigration, there won't be one.
A few years back I said that welfare was a national security issue--not just in the sense that almost every "Arab" terrorist from Mohammed Atta to Zacarias Moussaoui to Ahmed Ressam turns out to be a product of the Euro-Canadian welfare system, but also in a more basic way: these unsustainable liabilities threaten the social fabric of the state. Some of the countries mentioned above will reach a tipping point, after which it's merely a question of who grabs the levers of power in Rome or Madrid or Berlin first. I'd rather Canada started talking about these issues before it gets to that point. |
