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The Associated Press reports:
Canadian voters reclaimed their country's liberal identity sending Justin Trudeau — the son of one of the country's most dynamic politicians — to the prime minister's office and ending nearly a decade of conservative leadership under Stephen Harper.
The victory in Monday's election by Trudeau's Liberal Party was stunning. The Liberals were on a path to win at least 184 seats out of 338 - a parliamentary majority that will allow Mr. Trudeau to govern without relying on other parties.
As is always the case with politicians or political parties who lose big, the Conservatives are reeling in shock. But this result should not come as a surprise: Canada is a democracy, and in a healthy democracy, it's essential for the parties to exchange places every now and the.
You don't have to go much farther than your nearest American city to see why: our worst poverty-pocket urban hellholes have been ruled by Democrats longer than living memory, and are so irredeemably corrupt that in several places a majority of their past executives (Detroit, Illinois) are serving time.
While it's fun to blame corruption and incompetence on Democratic policies, the fact is, left unchecked by voters, Republicans are no better - and sometimes, as in Illinois, collude with the Democrat majority to jointly fleece the public exchequer. What do you expect? Power corrupts! Politicians, like diapers, should be changed frequently, and for the same reason.
So it's perfectly right and proper that the voters of Canada chose to swap out one ruling party for the other, especially when the Conservatives have been in office for nearly a decade.
Which, given that democracies have been around for some while and everybody is familiar with the principle of alternating parties, is why it's somewhat startling to consider just how little of permanence the Conservatives accomplished, and how many profound and irreversible changes Trudeau is jumping out of the gate with.
If there's one thing Harper's government is famous for, it's the Canuck equivalent of "Drill, baby, drill!" The Conservatives wasted no time in squeezing every iota of cash out of their tar sand reserves once fracking technology allowed them to do so, in contrast to Mr. Obama's foot-dragging.
This has no doubt helped the Canadian economy, though apparently not as much as hoped - and the recent slump in oil prices was an outsize gut-punch that may have doomed the Conservatives in the election. How long, though, do you think the productivity will last under a Trudeau administration, considering that the new prime minister has already called for a moratorium on fracking? Within a couple of years, the Conservative's signature economic policy will be nothing more than a few holes in the ground and the memory of full bank accounts for working-class rig roustabouts.
Harper's cultural victories were every bit as ephemeral. Much as America does, Canada has a taxpayer-supported national broadcaster that is absurdly leftist. Unlike our own pusillanimous Republicans, Harper at least had the boldness to cut funding for his; Trudeau has already promised to pay his media fellow travelers all they want and more.
What could Harper have done that might have made a long-term difference? For one thing, he could have abolished the odious Canadian Human Rights Commission and its provincial equivalents, which even Wikipedia had to admit suffered "some controversy." The views of the Commission can be pithily summed up by the CHRC's own lead investigator Dean Steacy:
[When] asked "What value do you give freedom of speech when you investigate?" Steacy responded: "Freedom of speech is an American concept, so I don't give it any value... It's not my job to give value to an American concept."
Where do we start with dissecting this Big Lie? Freedom of speech is hardly unique to America. It originated with the English as did Canada, and it's widely considered to be a fundamental human right. For a government investigator to proudly proclaim that free speech is of no value is appalling.
But Steacy's disgusting views accurately reflected the practices of his employer: the CHRC was notorious for prosecuting conservatives for "hate speech," most famously Mark Steyn and Maclean's magazine, but also including clergy who believe the Bible's teachings on homosexuality as well as lesser authors who criticized Muslims.
If there's one thing a Conservative government ought to stand for, it's freedom of speech and of religion - and indeed, Harper's government did repeal one small section of the CHRC's powers. But the pocket tyrants of the CHRC continued to collect their lavish government salaries, and now that their friend Trudeau is in power, they are wasting no time in getting Harper's minor changes reversed.
It is highly improbable that Stephen Harper will be the last ever Conservative prime minister of Canada. Somewhere down the road, the people of Canada will grow tired of Liberal corruption and incompetence - or maybe just sick of the same old faces on TV all the time - and give them the boot in their turn.
But what will take their place? Trudeau has already announced promises, much like our own President Obama, to ensure a permanent leftist majority:
To restore healthcare for refugees and reinstitute family reunification in immigration. They would allow, for instance, elderly parents to join their families in Canada as permanent residents, entitled to health care and other services. The Harper government has consigned such folks to precarious status on annually renewable visitor’s visas...
To bring 25,000 Syrian refugees to Canada by the end of this year...
To make a major investment in on-reserve First Nations education, without imposing Harper's humiliating and draconian conditions on First Nations communities, all in the context of a renewed nation-to-nation relationship with Canada’s First Nations, Inuit and Métis people.
We'll eat this article if more than a handful of the Syrian "refugees" are the Christians who are actually persecuted. No, it'll be yet another gaggle of Islamist fundamentalist barbarians and criminals. As far as educating Indians, well, we don't suppose the government will be immersing them in a love of Canada and Western culture when even Conservative Harper apologized to them for "the assumption aboriginal cultures and spiritual beliefs were inferior and unequal" - which, by any rational measure, is objectively true.
So before new Prime Minister Trudeau even has a chance to thoroughly settle into his new digs, he'll implement irreversible policies furthering leftism for all time to come. Before the year is out, there will be hardly a remnant of ten years of Conservative governance.
Sometimes you just have to wonder - what's the point?