It happened! The Canadians threw out the Liberal Party, divesting themselves of the obnoxious Paul Martin and ending the Liberals’ 12-year rule marked by runaway spending and reflexive anti-Americanism. The vote was narrow and divided,but at least Conservative Party leader Stephen Harper will have a chance to form a minority government. Here’s the news straight from Canadian television:
“Harper then reached out to the regions, repeating a campaign promise to solve the fiscal imbalance and promising to let the Atlantic provinces keep their offshore resource money. “The West, he said, will now have the voice in Ottawa it has long sought.”
Western Canada, of course, is the home of Canada’s millions of social conservatives who have found themselves marginalized and effectively silenced under the Liberal regime. Here’s Canadian blogger David Warren (thanks to Kathy Shaidle) describing the social conservatives as the Canadians::
“Who are more favourably disposed to the United States than to the average fashionable Third World dictatorship. Who are not instinctively offended by the existence of our military, or our police. Who understand risk and reward. Who are proud of what their ancestors achieved in this country. Who work for a living, and resent the fact that most of the high taxes they pay go to purposes and programmes they find abhorrent.
“These are people who fear and love God, and try to raise their children ‘properly’ and keep them away, as much as possible, from the spectacle of moral degradation that has become a commonplace of urban life. Who in fact have children. Who, for the most part, long since moved away from ‘downtown’.
“Many of them are New Canadians. Many of them came to this country for a chance to raise their children in freedom, as Christians, or as observant Jews, or Hindus, or Sikhs, or Muslims.
“‘Disenfranchised’ is a strong word, but I am convinced it is used fairly to describe the Canadian equivalent of this non-urban or ex-urban constituency. It is on the backs of these largely unrepresented taxpayers that a social revolution has been mounted through the last two generations. Their job has been to earn the money to pay for the fallout from that revolution — through government programmes that consistently reward irresponsibility and failure — while keeping their opinions to themselves”
Canada’s Conservative Party, of course, would be regarded as the moderate wing of the Republican Party here. And it won no majority victory yesterday. But yesterday’s showing was a start. A lot of Canadians are dying for a change.