The New PM: What's He All Aboot?

The election last week of a Conservative prime minister in Canada has had a lot of the usual blogosphere bed-wetters up to their old tricks: condemning Stephen Harper before knowing much about him, assuming that he would charge blindly toward the abolition of gay marriage in Canada, pulling out the usual arsenal of epithets, etc.

I was disappointed when Harper quickly announced that he would ask Parliament to revisit the issue of gay marriage, but I was also intrigued that he chose not to pursue Canada's political equivalent of the nuclear option, something called the "Notwithstanding Clause."

Because this site takes pride in appreciating the grays where others seem to see black-and-white, and because I knew I would sorely be out of my depth trying to understand just exactly what the wacky Canucks are up to, I commissioned Anthony, one of our resident Canadian experts, to give us his take.  He agreed to do so, wearing a more dispassionate, analytical hat (although I did not ask him to suppress any of his personal opinions):

The recent election of a Conservative government in Canada raises the specter of a revisiting the same-sex marriage issue by Parliament. It has been only a few months that same-sex marriage has been legal across Canada.  What began as a campaign by a few gay and lesbian couples in Ontario to get married, and was taken up by other couples in province after province, led to a patchwork of laws across Canada, with seven provinces and one territory allowing marriage, while three provinces and the other two territories did not. The writing was on the wall, and the Liberal government of Paul Martin held a vote in Parliament to change the definition of marriage to include members of the same sex.

This was not a free vote (i.e., a vote where a member of Parliament would be allowed to vote his or her conscience, defy his/her party and not face party retribution). The vote was, as expected, very tight. The Conservatives voted overwhelmingly against the change; the left-wing Bloc Quebecois and New Democratic Party as well as a majority of the government voted for the measure. It just squeaked by amidst great political drama, including a moderate conservative who crossed the floor to the Liberal party the night before the vote.

It has been argued (effectively, I believe) that two elections ago the Conservatives lost momentum in vote rich Ontario and Quebec because of outspoken opposition to gay rights and abortion rights. The specter of a Republican social revolution in Canada worried voters outside the more conservative prairies and pushed the Conservatives back to second place.

This time around, the Conservatives proposed that they would have a free vote in Parliament to amend the marriage law and create a separate but equal “civil union” for gays and lesbians. It will be the first time that removing civil rights that were granted in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms will be put to a vote in Parliament, and marks a strong shift to the right on social policy for Canada. Should the legislation pass and marriage rights be restricted to heterosexuals, the main LGBT groups fighting for equal marriage will likely take the matter up with the Supreme Court of Canada. Should the Supremes decide that gays and lesbians do have an equal right to marriage – and one assumes they would – the government would have only one arrow in its quiver: the Notwithstanding Clause.

When the constitution was repatriated to Canada in 1981, it was decided that provincial and federal governments must have an option of “opting-out” of constitutional decisions for a period of five years. To invoke the Notwithstanding Clause is a way to forestall a disruptive social change imposed by the court. The most notable time it was used was when the Supremes found that the language law in Quebec discriminated against the English-speaking minority. Long a volatile social issue, language is to Quebecers what race is to Americans, and the Quebec government invoked the Notwithstanding Clause. Social peace reigned, and Anglophones are still discriminated against.

This, then, would be Harper's’s only option, and it’s considered a hardcore response to the extension of marriage rights to all Canadians. He has said time and again he will not use it, which means that his fight for “straight-only” marriage is doomed from the start. The question on everyone’s mind is, of course, "Is he planning to use it anyway?" He may have left himself some wiggle room in the way he promised not to use the clause. And that leads us to the more important question: Who is Steven Harper? And this is a little harder to answer.

In Canada he is generally held to be lacking in charisma. He is a bean counter, a transplant from Ontario to Alberta, where he has never fit in as among the cowboys. The tough-talking, straight-shooting Albertan (Canada’s Texas) generally doesn’t go for the button-down, uptight WASP from Ontario. But they have adopted Harper as one of their own. His recent habit of ending speeches with “God Bless Canada” may strike many Americans as a non-event, in Canada it was earth-shaking and opened up a the possibility of a publicly religious man holding office. In Canada a national trait (which so annoyed Lord Black) was to be circumspect in all things. Trumpeting your religion was and is considered showing off, and generally voters react badly to it – even religious ones. He is not known to have any gay friends or confidants, though, to be fair, he is not known to have any friends or confidants, really. He is often very solitary, more of an intellectual (his first career) than a politician by nature.

The minority Conservative government will most likely focus only on those pieces of legislation that have a chance of passing. It is unlikely he will get into a scrap over same-sex marriage, unless he has a firm belief (e.g., religious) that this is something he must do now. His government is likely to last approximately 18 months, and if he has done well and not alienated Canadians outside of the prairies, he may actually win a majority the next time. That is when he is most likely to put Gay and Lesbian equality on the chopping block. His reticence and lack of public persona make him very hard to judge and very easy to paint as one thing or another (whether bigot or saviour of the Dominion). Canadians will finally get to see what he has up his sleeve in the near future, and the elusive Mr. Harper will finally be a known quantity to us.

Comments

[beautifulatrocities]

The PQ is headed by a gay cokehead. Q: Was the issue of gay marriage in Canada settled by the voters, the legislature, or the courts?

[beautifulatrocities]

Never mind, I didn't see the below the line post. It's early out here. I prefer the issue settled by the legislature or the voters to judicial fiat. Here in California, voters passed a law defining marriage between a man & a woman (despite Sully's idiotic lies that this only applied to out of state marriages). The entrenched Democrat assembly passed a law last year in complete defiance of this, & when Arnold vetoed it, gays screamed foul. But Arnold is elected too. If Californians really want gay marriage, they'll presumably vote for a governor who will allow it

[Christopher]

The point, really, is this: Stephen Harper must be seen to be abiding by the will of his constituents. Given that Canada's voters are nearly equally divided on the subject of gay marriage, Mr. Harper must be seen to be making an attempt to satisfy both ends of the spectrum if he eventually wants to govern with a majority.

He has chosen a battle that he's knows he stands little chance of winning, but the point is, he has chosen to continue to engage in it, thusly mollifying the more conservative elements of Canada's populace. When he loses the vote to overturn the law as it stands now, and he will, he will be faced with a decision as to wether or not invoke the Notwithstanding Clause; he will not, and as a consequence will increase his power base by being seen, at least in this case, as a moderate.

We do in fact know Stephen Harper; he is not unlike most of the men who have held the office of Canada's Prime Minister. He is a follower, not a leader, and in a constitutional democracy where any government, no matter it's place in the spectrum, must pay heed to the voters and the courts, that might not be a bad thing.