All favour “respectful” or indeed “open” federalism, the current vogue term for the old “co-operative” federalism, wherein the feds co-operate and the provinces do whatever they like. None would start up any new shared-cost social programs without the provinces’ say-so, and then only if dissenting provinces could “opt out with compensation.” Intriguingly, however, the Conservatives threaten to invoke the federal trade and commerce power if the provinces do not dismantle their trade barriers by 2010. And the Conservatives are the only party to evince an interest in Senate reform. You may decide how likely that is in your lifetime.
But in general, there just aren’t the sorts of vast philosophical divides between the parties that there might
have been in the past. In large part this is welcome. It’s good news that deficit spending is dead, as it is that nobody now proposes to increase the rate of inflation. Even the NDP doesn’t want to pull out of NAFTA any more, just “renegotiate” it.
But this is nothing more than the triumph of the status quo. And in other areas, a more wide-ranging debate is surely in order. Take foreign investment. The Conservatives would slightly loosen the rules in two sectors, airlines and uranium, and then only if other countries do likewise. Is that the best we can do? The Liberals would knock one percentage point off the bottom tax brackets, leaving the top rate where it has been for two decades. Is that the stuff of which Northern Tigers are made?
The Greens, at least, promise proportional representation (along with a $50 carbon tax and tens of billions of new spending), which would open up the political marketplace to parties like, well, the Greens. Must we wait until then for Canadian politics to get interesting?
