Conservatives win Canadian Elections

Liberal/Socialist interests are suffering a serious string of defeats worldwide. Canada, Germany, and the U.S. have elected "more conservative" governments.

Questions for debate:

1) Do you agree that there is a "trend" to shift to the right?


2) What do you feel are the "causes"


3) What impact is this going to have on our own Democrat Party, i.e. Will they shift to the center/right to try and regain some votes, or further shift to the Michael Moore/Kos wing?

I don't necessarily think there's a global shift to the right. You'll notice that in South America there is a strong shift in exactly the opposite direction (Chavez, Morales, etc.)

Socialists won victories in Spain last year, Labour still runs the UK.

Canada and Germany went right I agree and some other nations went left, I don't see a huge trend.

Until your definition of the world doesn't include South and Central America.... where Socialist Michele Bachelet won in Chile and Evo Morales won in Bolivia. Also, in Mexico left-leaning candidate is leading in the polls. In Italy, all opinion polls show that Romano Prodi, the centre-left candidate, will become the next prime minister.
As for Canada, we both know that it wasn't Conservatives who won the election, it was Liberals who lost it. With the unprecedented economic growth, Liberals should have won these elections with ease, but apparently, they got caught with too many hands in a cookie jar. Nevertheless, as I understand, Conservative party's parliament majority is too thin to pass any legislation to really steer the country in a different direction.

So, as these examples show, there're no "trend" indicating any meaningful shift to the right... which makes your second and third questions moot.

P.S. In Germany, the elections were so close that Merkel was forced to form a "Grand Coalition" with the opposing party. Yes, she's die Kanzlerin, but does it really indicate a shift to the right if she won't be able to pass any legislation to steer Germany to the right?

There is a difficulty in making general cases from examples like these. In Canada, the Liberal Party, which had been in power for about 15 years, was marred by a scandal which seriously damaged the Prime Minister. This is the primary reason why the Conservatives in Canada managed to squeeze out a minority government. The majority of seats in the House of Commons are still owned by left-of-centre parties, making any 'conservative' social change difficult to impossible.



Well, firstly you have the problem that the Canadian election was one of specific issues and fear of corruption, not ideology.

But more importantly, you should also be aware that the MOST right-wing party in Canada, the Conservative party, is still MORE left-wing than the supposedly-left/centre Democratic party in the United States. There is no compairason between Canadian and American politics in terms of ideology.

I'm not sure that's true.

The Canadian Conservative party says that tax cuts, mandatory minimum sentencing, choice in child care, and a stronger military are their stances.

They are against free trade.

I'm not sure that puts them to the left of American Democrats.

Source: Key Issues for the Conservative party

OK, you got me.... #48 (Chile) & #108 (Bolivia) on the CIA's 2005 GDP estimates 2005 GDP bucked the trend, as well as a few others in Central & South America, and the African continent also for whatever that's worth...

Perhaps I should have stated more clearly "of the worlds largest" or something, but I tried not to offend any non-US readers by dragging in measures such as GDP.

As for the UK's "Labour" party, my perception of PM Major is somewhat to the right of Teddy Kennedy, perhaps I'm wrong.

I agree that Germany, as well as Canada, are not quite Texas. I still perceive there has been a significant shift in both of them away from the left.

1) Do you agree that there is a "trend" to shift to the right?

- Spain & Portugal – Socialist
- France and Germany seem to be moving ever-so-slightly to the right. (France rejecting Chirac’s EU constitution and Germany displacing the Green/SPD coalition)
- UK staying about the same with Blair (not Major) at the helm and Lib Dems gaining some.
- Canada – slightly right, but their election offers more of a lesson for the US Republicans than the Democrats (power corrupts!) If the Abramoff thing blows up as big as it could, we’d have the same result and Canadians would ask “is the US moving left”
- Korea – moving leftwards
- Japan – center-right and moving that way for a while.
- Russia – moving right, with Putin consolidating power in the Executive Branch.
- Central / South America – moving left
- Mexico – was moving right with Fox, looks like Lopez-Obrador in 2006, who is center-left, but running on a big-time law-and-order program. This is the guy who hired Giuliani to help clean up Mexico City.

I’d say it’s not exactly a trend.

They are for tax cuts because the Conservative party is trying to shake the reputation of having brough Canadians the single largest tax increase in Canadian history in 1988.

All parties, even the socialist NDP are for increased spending on the military, because right now the Canadian military is abysmal.

The Conservatives are most certainly NOT against Free trade at all. In fact it was the Conservatives that pushed forward the FTA and NAFTA agreements. In fact the very first purpose statement in their platform is pro-free trade, and how they want to lead Canada in developing a 'free trade of the Americas' treaty.


They are however pro-abortion, pro gun-registration, very pro-universal healthcare, pro-immigration and pro-environment. They are also (as all parties in Canada) entirely secular. The Conservatives have further stated that they would not send troops to assist the United States in Iraq, keeping with the stance of the previous Liberal government.

And that is Canada's RIGHT-WING party. That certainly puts them on the far-left wing of US politics...

You know, I had debated starting a discussion myself but figured it wasn't worth it. Most of the other threads I've started about Canada generally went nowhere, not because of the posters here on America's Debate mind you, but the pool of information available to them which prohibits an informed debate.

The problem is that we all (Canadians, Americans, Brits, etc.) tend to rely on generalized information about other countries (with the exception of the U.S., given the dearth and presence of American media), and that requires us to fill in the gaps with our own experience. The end result is that we are often working from perspectives/assumptions which are incorrect.

This sort of discussion is the perfect example. As I was explaining to our fearless leader Mike last night, the election here in Canada was not indicative of a shift to the right amongst the Canadian population, only a shift in the government as a result of an unrelated crisis.

Unfortunately I don't know enough to comment on Spain/Germany specifically, but if I did I would probably do so under false pretenses. Are the governments there no longer "left wing"? Definitely, but the reasons and implications are harder to auger.

Good point Joe that I really didn't consider in fashioning the thread.
Taken to another degree, I now understand why Dutch, Turkish, et al, posters have the impressions they do. Much of their information is filtered through the lenses of the likes of al-Reuters and CNN.

Well, I can't speak for the other non-americans on this board, but I frequently read newssites such as foxnews.com, newsmax.com and capmag.com (the latter is not really a news site, but I digress). So I do get input from other sources than CNN and Reuters.

Furthermore I can honestly say, that I don't see any major difference in the reporting on the foxnews.com site and the CNN international edition site. If you substract the overwhelming numbers of conservative pundits from foxnews (which is not considered news anyway), its really just like CNN in my opinion.

The reason for my disagreements with the current US regime is not that I get the "wrong" information - it's that I fundamentally disagree with their politics, and I don't need to be told that by the media. Blaming the media for the bad rep of the current US administration may be valid in countries like Iran and Pakistan, but most of us are indeed capable of making our own informed opinions, based on input from both sides in the debate.

1) Do you agree that there is a "trend" to shift to the right?

As others have pointed out, the "trend" is more localized to First World countries, and even there, it appears to be only a tentative beginning of a move in that direction.

2) What do you feel are the "causes"

Well, someone on another thread posted this interesting quote from Tony Blair:


Coming as this does from the leader of the leftward of Britain's two main parties, that's some pretty stinging criticism, and I think it accounts for a lot of the shift. Another common thread between the conservative victories in Canada and Germany is a willingness to be less confrontational with the U.S.A. There may have been a little bit of a backlash against some of the extreme anti-American rhetoric coming out of many leftist politicians. Iran's acquisition of nuclear technology may have further contributed to this.

That may have been further exacerbated by uneasiness about Muslim minorities living among them, especially in light of the bombings in Britain and the riots in France. One German state, Baden-Wurttembergh, has proposed including a questionnaire on citizenship application forms (apparently individual German states have a limited autonomy in this area) that really try to weed out people with social and political attitudes that are prevalent in large areas of the Islamic world, regarding democracy, marital lines of authority, etc.

3) What impact is this going to have on our own Democrat Party, i.e. Will they shift to the center/right to try and regain some votes, or further shift to the Michael Moore/Kos wing?

This is going to depend a lot on how the Republicans play it up. Europe for years has been a reliable example that American liberals could point to to show that their ideology does work. That is, that you can have social welfarism combined with a relatively decent standard of living. The problem with that view for a long time, though, has been that European countries were mortgaging the future to pay for their present benefits. Well, the "future" is starting to arrive, and I think that may be causing a lot of Europeans to reevaluate their ideology. If Republicans seize on this, they just may be able to get a lot of Americans to reevaluate their own as well.