What if Canada had UK type parties

We'd have a national housing plan today with British Labour running things in the colonial outpost of Ottawa.

B.C. would be a dead-even Tory/Labour split.

A better question might be "What if Canada's parliament were elected like the UK elects its Euro-MP's-with regional lists?"

Probably Nova Scotia as well.

Lord Palmerston wrote:

I'm not sure exactly who the LibDems appeal to - they seem to be something like the Canadian Greens aspire to be.

I agree. This is kind of a hard thing to play with, but I'm bored too so I'll make a guess about BC. Let's assume marginal seats are won by 10 points or less in the last election, leaning seats 10-15 points, strong 15-25 and anything over 25 points can be considered safe.

So let's say this about BC:

Vancouver Island North - Leaning/Strong Labour. A few Tory terms during the 80s though.

Nanimo Alberni - Marginal Labour. Used to be more Labour friendly but trending towards tories as it becomes a popular retirement community.

Nanimo Cowichan -  Strong/Safe Labour.

Esquimalt Juan De Fuca - Strong/Leaning Labour. A few Tory terms in the 80s, potential pick up if Tories win majority in 2010.

Victoria - Strong/Leaning Labour. Lib Dems 2nd, targeting in 2010.

Saanich Gulf Islands - Marginal Tory. Labour between 1997 and 2005. Lib Dems edge Labour for 2nd and target for 2010.

Burnaby-Douglas - Strong/Safe Labour - Lib Dems 2nd.

Burnaby-New Westminster - Safe/Strong Labour.

New Westminster-Coquitlam - Strong Labour - 1 Tory term from 1983-1987.

North Vancouver - Marginal Tory, Lib Dems 2nd. Lib Dem held from 1997-2005; re-targetting for 2010.

Port Moody-Westwood-Port Coquitlam - Marginal Tory, Labour Marginal from 1997-2005.

Vancouver Centre - Leaning Labour, Tory and Lib Dem target in 2010 in one of the few three-way races in the province.

Vancouver East - Marginal RESPECT if Canada went into Iraq otherwise traditionally Safe Labour. If Canada went into Iraq, Labour target in 2010.

Vancouver Quadra - Leaning Lib Dem, traditional Tory seat pre-1997. Tory target in 2010.

Vancouver South - Marginal Labour, traditional Tory seat pre-1997. Tory target in 2010.

West Vancouver-Sunshine Coast-Sea to Sky Country - Marginal Lib Dem, Labour 1997-2001, Tory pre-1997. Tory target in 2010.

Abbotsford - Safe Tory. Period, best non-Tory show pushed it to Strong Tory in 1997 and 2001.

Chilliwack Fraser Canyon - Safe Tory. See above.

Delta-Richmond East - Traditional Tory seat, Leaning Tory now. Marginal Labour from 1997 to 2005.

Fleetwood-Port Kells - Leaning Labour, Tory target in 2010.

Langley - Strong/Safe Tory, Marginal Labour from 1997 to 2001.

Newton-North Delta - Leaning Labour, Tory target in 2010.

Pitt Meadows-Maple Ridge-Mission - Marginal Labour, Tory target in 2010.

Richmond - Leaning Tory, Marginal Labour from 1997 to 2005.

South Surrey-White Rock-Cloverdale - Leaning/Strong Tory, Lib Dems 2nd.

Surrey North - Strong/Safe Labour, battle for 2nd.

British Columbia Southern Interior - Safe Labour. Lib Dems edge out Tories for 2nd.

Cariboo-Prince George - Marginal Labour, Tory target in 2010.

Kamloops-Thompson-Cariboo - Leaning Labour, Tory target in 2010. Only seat in the interior where the Lib Dems are (relatively) competitive.

Kelowna-Lake Country - Strong Tory, feint Lib Dem hopes in 1997; though they still tend to finish ahead of Labour.

Kootenay-Columbia - Leaning Labour, Tory target in 2010. Despite the Conservative margin federally, has strong labour union base, and most of the provincial ridings are NDP, justifying my decision in this scenario.

Okangan-Coquihalla - Safe/Strong Tory. Labour and Lib Dems battle it out for 2nd.

Okangan-Shushwap - Leaning Tory, Labour from 1997-2005.

Prince George-Peace River - Leaning Tory, Labour from 1997-2005.

Skeena Bulkley Valley - Strong Labour, traditionally Safe Labour though.

After Blair, Labour has become quite Right-wing, probably even to the right of the grits. Or with Iggy, probably the same. Labour would only equal NDP pre 1994.

As someone who has lived in both systems, I'd have to say that the nearest equivalents are as follows:

Labour: Liberals (dumped any ideological baggage long ago, will do anything to appear popular, packed with opportunistic careerists,  bends over backwards for business)

Tories: Tories (has ideological baggage and loves it, but doesn't want to appear too hardcore; will do unmentionable acts for business)

Lib Dems: NDP (both have a social democratic element, although it's stronger in the NDP and there is more than a little bit of 'Old Labour' with the Dippers, something I'm all in favour of)

SNP: BQ (the SNP dreams of flexing the kind of muscle the BQ has, and has been aping a number of things the PQ have done)

To answer the opening post question -- then we would be too drunk to care about the result of the election.

Sean in Ottawa wrote:

To answer the opening post question -- then we would be too drunk to care about the result of the election.

As are many people in the UK.

edmundoconnor wrote:

SNP: BQ (the SNP dreams of flexing the kind of muscle the BQ has, and has been aping a number of things the PQ have done)

I'm waiting for them to try to make Gaelic the official language of business in Scotland. That would be an amusing day.

Lord Palmerston wrote:

Maybe rural Nova Scotia would elect some Lib Dems.

Or more to the point, I can see PEI with an all-Lib Dem slate.

Oh, and re the BNP, I can see them having more strength in an Oshawa-type seat than in Alberta.

And thinking further re Toronto Centre: I can see it with SDP representation in the 1980s...

Canada does have lots of Chinese takeout.  Is that the same thing?

Ha, awesome Doug.

Anyways, though I'm a polisci nerd, I'm not seriously wedded to any of this even though I do feel a bizarre need to justify my choices more. So anyone who questions them, prepare to get crushed should you dare disagree with my wisdom. J/K, but seriously, I'll explain why I choose the way I did more so if you ask. All that being said, don't think I'm too wedded to these choices or anything.

Vortigern wrote:

 

PS. I like Vansterdam's list of BC Ridings. Just a few comments. I see Van-Quadra as a Lib-Dem seat, like several UK seats containing sizeable universities. Okanagan-Shuswap would probably see the strongest showing for Labour in the valley, but it's still the Okanagan, and that kind of rural seat is Tory bread and butter. Prince George-Peace River is perma-Tory. Maybe a few other minor differences of opinion, but mainly differences of degree.

Thanks. Just so it's clear though, whatever I list first is who currently "holds" the seat and how much they won in by in the last election (which is 2005 and imposes as much of the UK political environment on Canada as is possible, while replicating Canada's political culture). So I'm saying that Van-Quadra is a Lib Dem seat now that they won by a marginal margin in 2005. As for the last two I just picked them as having been Labour from 1997 to 2005 because the NDP has won them before (1988 federally and the composite parts in the 1991 provincial election) or came close to winning them in the same elections, so I thought a stronger party ala Labour in 1997 and 2001 would've gone over the top there. It's also connected to the way that Labour won a lot of traditional Tory seats in those UK elections that no one would've expected them to win normally, but they managed to do so in 1997.

Lord Palmerston wrote:

I'd have to dispute that one.  West Van would be a total Tory stronghold.

Saanich-Gulf Islands I think would be more likely to go LibDem.

I just think that the West Van would be more competitive and hard to choose because of the economic diversity in the riding. In Canada the Conservatives have strength throughout the riding, which is probably bolstered the weaker the Liberals get, so I could see your reasoning. Otoh, people in places like Whistler and West Vancouver despite being open to voting Conservative, also don't necessarily want to be tagged as red necks so they're also open to the Greens and Liberals who occupy somewhat of the same niche as the Lib Dems in a riding like this. At the same time obviously Whistler and West Van are dead zones to even social democratic in name only parties like Labour, let alone the NDP. On the other hand this riding also includes Squamish, Powell River and the Sunshine Coast, all of which are more NDP/Green friendly in Canada so they'd be more Labour and Lib Dem friendly too.

As for Saanich-Gulf Islands, that one is tough to gage. Its very idiosyncratic with the Exurban/Suburban demographic, which is more Lib Dem and Tory, the Gulf Island Hippies and provincial government workers who may live in both places and commute to Victoria who are more Labour and Lib Dem friendly.

I've noticed that I left Vancouver-Kingsway out of this list. I'd rate it as a Leaning/Strong Labour seat that used to be a Safe Labour seat. It would be the sort of seat the Tories would love to win, and with a large right-leaning Chinese-Canadian population it's not an unreasonable target, but I couldn't imagine it going Tory especially in this scenario with an even stronger left(ish) party like Labour.

Bag Kitty wrote:

Ever been to Red Deer?

I'm not suggesting the BNP equivalent would take the whole province, but outside of Calgary and Edmonton, I can picture them taking a seat or two. It might be unfair to pick on Red Deer in particular, but a win there would not shock me -- there is a lot of crazieness that takes place under the "Con" tent flaps.

I don't know that I'd go that far. That being said, mentioning Red Deer and immigrants reminds me of a trip I once took through Alberta with my graduating class. My high school was very Asian, so obviously my classmates on the trip reflected those demographics. Anyways, the looks on people's faces when we got off the tour buses in Red Deer at some strip mall that I can't remember the name of. Holy fuck, you could almost see their mouths drop to the pavement.

Maybe it's a measure of the 416, but I'm even wondering whether Don Valley West would qualify as Tory anymore, or whether it would have gone Lib Dem a la Sheffield Hallam by now.

And back to the BNP issue: one must remember that compared to a lot of European nativist/nationalist parties, the BNP's pretty ragtag, in the "yobbos, hooligans, and blue-collar louts" sense, so don't put them on too much of a pedestal--my feeling is, their Canadian highwater mark is more likely to be something like their prevailing in a three-way race for a distant-enough second in Etobicoke North...

Australia, with its clean left/right split, is almost *too* easy.

Though while the Wildrose Alta = BNP metaphor seems farfetched, the notion of Jim Pankiw leading a Pauline Hanson-type populist party is extraordinarily plausible...

Ken Burch wrote:

edmundoconnor wrote:

 

(Pauline)Hanson is emigrating, by the way. Got to love that. And to the UK of all places. I shudder to think if her and Nick Griffin get chummy.

Let alone what sort of creatures might appear if they mated.

Uggh I think I barfed a bit in my mouth.

The hardest thing with this exercise is that Quebec is part of the greater imperial formation of Canada, and the UK is a part of the greater imperial formation of the EU. This, I believe, is the main reason a parallel between the UK and Canadian parties is difficult. The UK is a dense and predominantly unilingual European State. Canada is an authoritarian imperialist reaction against the American Revolution, and like America sprawls over several time zones. Formerly a colony, Canada is now a full imperialist country in its own right. Canada has gone from being a colony to being an imperialist power, and Britain has gone from being THE imperialist power to being AN imperialist power.

The Brits have actually signed away some of their sovereignity to the EU. These changes are mostly objected to by Tories and Eurosceptics, especially the Human Rights Act which the EU required that Britain pass. UK Home Secretary and ConservaTroll heartthrob Theresa May is playing politics with this issue, trying to stir up xenophobia in paleoTory ranks, while blaming a cat for the Human Rights Act. Already Tory bootlickers are dampening Mrs. May's footwear, considering her to be 'leadership material'. It seems we have a new Mrs. Thatcher waiting in the wings. It looks like the other cabinet minister who called May out for her disingenuity and specious argumentation over said catflap is on his way out the door. All you have to do to get David "Flashman" Cameron to agree to your misanthropic ConservaTrolling is say to pretty please.

Economically, High Street Britain is just as much a slave of the City of London and Wall St. as is Main St. USA or Queen St. Canada. It is just that Britain has a long and ignomious history of imperialism. The Anglosphere imperialist power is a double-headed beast of Wall St. and the City, both approximately equal in size. THIS Is what rules us. Not an entity called 'USA' or 'UK' or 'G8' or whatever. By all accounts, the disadvantaged classes of Britons no longer benefit from imperialism, and are just as Puerto-Ricoized as the rest of us. For those lucky enough, it is a shit job at shit pay. For the rest, a few quid a week on the dole, and maybe a tiny smidgeon of labour aristocracy on the side (Like here and the US, union membership has fallen dramatically in the UK, as usual with the collusion of the union bureaucracy whose salaries are untouched). For the average person with nothing, it is just like here. Actually, maybe even a little worse. Canada is relatively new to the imperialist game. Outward Foreign Direct Investment exceeded inward FDI only in 2003 or so, which is about time we started beefing up our military and started participating in foreign military adventures as a combattant. No matter what the countries known as 'Canada', 'USA', and 'UK' do militarily, if we are not millionaires and billioniares, we are just a bunch of colonized peasants anyway. Under neoliberalism, there are no more preferred working classes. Obama will bomb his own citizens just as quickly as those of other states. Labour competetiveness with China is the important thing now, if we are to listen to our own union leaders. Don't let the UK's glorious imperialist past, with a stroppy faux-socialist labour union movement featherbedded by slave labour in the colonies, be confused to the situation today. Major austerity is coming, and it will take the combined might of the Tory Party, the Lib-Dems, Labour, the Union movement (and the Socialist Workers Party) in the UK to keep the lid from blowing off.

Thus Britain has nationalist leanings in the two main parties opposed to the EU, which would be similar if anything to the sovereignist/BQ/PQ position in Quebec wrt the rest of Canada. Leftists oppose the EU on the basis it is a neoliberal organization and Rightists consider it to be the EUSSR. As we can see from China, both are right. Neoliberalism and Stalinism are hand and glove, and provide considerable political infighting for cover.

Scotland is being written off as there is only one Tory seat there anyway. Ironically similar to Quebec in that respect I suppose. Call Me Dave "The Chameleon" Cameron has tried to build a Wet (Thatcherite for Progressive Conservative) wing of the UK Tories, and he has even described himself as a PC. This had some success with Blairites in the May 2010 election (along with Gordon Brown turning into a turd sandwich). As you will find here, there will also be Technocratic Libertarians, a smattering of staunch monarchist reactionaries, socons (who are a bit more muted in the UK than Canada or the US), and various other reactionary little-England paleo-Tories and assorted cranks who organize well. Farmers are almost unanimously Tory in the UK, not so much in Canada where they have been famously NDP (and Liberal in SW Ontario).

The Lib-Dems are way more interventionist than the Canadian Liberal Party could ever be. Probably that is because Britain is more authoritarian than Canada is. However, as we see, they are just as likely to jump into bed with the Tories. The Lib-Dems are a coalition of paleoLiberals and a Social Democratic splitoff from Labour, so will be slightly more politically advanced than the LPC. The LPC uses the Left, but only lip service is changed by it. Like Labour, the NDP will be useful in stifling popular protest and revolutionary movements in collusion with union bureaucracies and the ruling class, especially when the going gets tough.

Occupy Bay St.? Occupy The City? Pass it on.