Hi Bill, It's not a very good article.
The Quebeckers are still recovering from centuries of Roman Catholic mis-rule (think Opus Dei until the end of WW2) so its a weird combination of 1960s time warp and 21st century whiz bang in the cities. Quebec is just about as corrupt as Maryland or NYC.
On the other hand, Western Canada in places is definitely right wing. The conurbation around Vancouver is getting on for 2 million and most of it a lot more conservative than the city itself.
Ontario is actually rather a conservative place but like the rest of Canada has suffered from the desperate nature of of Canadian conservative politics - Canadian conservatives eat their young: unlike the the US conservative folk they haven't managed until possibly the last few months (perhaps weeks) to isolate their wackos from right handed politics and they haven't (until possibly this year) got rid of the pink tories.
It hasn't been good for the country because the permanently ruling leftists even where they are incompetent have had a free ride for almost twenty years with little opposition.
It may be, no surprise, the Grey Lady is a bit behind the curve - the new Liberal party leader, Paul Martin, is far more rigorous than Chretien and will be moving his party a bit to the right and certainly will be more on Dubya's wavlength with regard to foreign affairs. Chretien has done his utmost the last year to foul Martin's bed.
Still, all in all, I think it's the case Canada is more socially relaxed than a good bit of the US. Think of it as a less progressive version, socially, of California spread all the way across your Northern border. Fiscally, of course, we're more sane than California - even the most degenerate of the socialist provincial governments never managed to create that kind of wretched excess.
Of course many Canadians are reflexively anti-American but that's basically because the US is 10x larger and can do pretty much what it likes with us and these days is more successful than we are - not like the 1950s when we were eating your lunch.
What really burns me is what has been done in Canadian schools since the 1960's. Teaching of Maths and Science has improved but that of arts and especially history has degenerated to lefty slush - WW2 is all about the Holocaust, Canadian history is all about multi-culturalism, description is equated to opinion and all opinions are equal - and we must be pleasant at all times. This kind of rubbishy mindset has floated into the universities.
Still, the thinking Canadian right about 15 years ago gave up on the political party and universities and started going the think tank route and is slowly delivering some intellectual rigour to conservative discussion. This has already had some effect on fiscal policy and over time will possibly have some effect on the social scene. I say this because Canadians are generally a bit more reliant on government than are US folk. The citizen-government relation is different here but should not be confused with citizen-gevernment relation you see in continental Europe.
Nonetheless, I expect the majority of Canadians will remain more socially "liberal" than that of the US for a long time until possibly a combination of demographics and socially conservative immigrants has an effect.
Outside the West you're just not going to get us back into the churches. Charismatic Christianity just never achieved the traction here it got in the US and mainline churches were just about flatline by the end of the 1950's. |
