Let’s get ready to rumble....
New book covers the great political fights of Canada’s history
I have to confess to some misgivings as I entered the ring to scrap with John Duffy. After all, the central argument of his new book, Fights of Our Lives: Elections, Leadership, and the Making of Canada, is that "elections matter," a belief I’d come increasingly to doubt. And what’s more, Duffy has been a longtime strategist for the federal Liberal party, an organization I’ve come to develop a deep, dark and probably unhealthy loathing for in recent years. This was going to be ugly.
"No they don’t." My first punch. "Elections don’t matter," I suggest to Duffy. Perhaps we thought they did, as recently as ’93, but then the Liberals went and made all the much-hated Tory policies they’d spent that election attacking (free trade, GST, etc.) their own. And they’ve done this before, I add, pointing to the previous great Liberal reversal on free trade back in 1896.
Got him.
"You think elections don’t matter," Duffy swipes back. "You think we would have had free trade if John Turner had been elected?" he asks, referring to the earlier slugfest of 1988.
"Um...," I feebly respond, "well, we would have free trade eventually in any case."
Duffy senses my hesitation. "I don’t buy that ‘forces of history’ stuff, I believe in human agency," he says. "What people do does matter, that’s why I wrote this book."
He’s right. Fights of Our Lives is indeed, as it claims, a fine chronicle of "how our leaders’ decisions are made within the constraints of our electoral system and in the context of the choices made by voters."
He’s got me on the ropes.
"OK," I concede, "but perhaps I meant to say most elections don’t matter. After all, you only identified five ‘great elections’ out of all the fights since 1867. Doesn’t this mean the other 30 or so didn’t really have much impact?"
Duffy barely flinches. "You forget my criteria for identifying a ‘great election,'" he says. "I was writing about those fights that could have gone either way, that resolved some great national question, and that even changed how we do politics itself."
As such, Duffy’s serious contenders are limited to the Liberal victories of 1896 (Laurier), 1925-26 (King) and 1979-80 (Trudeau) and the Conservative winds of 1957-58 (Diefenbaker) and 1988 (Mulroney). There are some other half-dozen or so "not-quite-great" elections (1891 on free trade, 1917 on conscription, 1945 on the welfare state), but Duffy regards these and other lesser contenders as "warm-ups" to the big fights.
I’m going down.
Round three. I’m about to launch into my next attack (i.e. elections serve to magnify really small differences in popular support and are therefore misleading indicators) when Duffy steps up for the kill.
"Look," he says. "There are four basic critiques of the parliamentary system. The Left say you always end up with the same elite, regardless of party. The Right say you always end up with Big Government, regardless. And Quebec and the West both say the system is stacked against them. I can deal with any of these. The point is that this is the system we’ve got, and by and large it’s worked pretty darn well. Look at 1988. It’s this system that won West farmers free trade, their historic objective. See, it works!"
From my position on the canvas I can see Duffy loom over me. I struggle one more time, but by now I’m blubbering incoherently. "Don’t get me wrong," I say. "I think it’s a really important book, even if I don’t agree with it. Even my students like it, though at $55 it’s a little...."
But before I see Duffy’s reaction to this, everything goes black.. |
