Before 9/11, the country’s Conservative movement was in disarray and the Canadian left had become a spent political force. The end of the summer of 2001 found Canadian Alliance leader Stockwell Day living on borrowed time on the heels of a major caucus mutiny and former prime minister Joe Clark failing to breathe new life in the rival Progressive Conservative party.
Over its seven years in power, Jean Chrétien had successfully appropriated the major policies Preston Manning and the Reform Party had originally brought to Parliament Hill.
The Liberals were basking in the political credit they had earned by eliminating the deficit, putting a federal frame around future Quebec attempts to secede and cutting taxes.
Over on the left, the NDP was running hard just to hang on to an obscure next-to-last place in the House of Commons.
Finally in Quebec, the pendulum was swinging back to the federal Liberals for the first time in two decades.
Twenty-first century Canada seemed destined to belong to the Liberal party.
After the twin towers of the World Trade Center came tumbling down, the ground shifted from under the ruling party.
The Liberals, who had successfully straddled the left/right divide throughout the 1990s, were taken off stride by the events of 9/11.
Under more intense American pressure than any previous Canadian government had ever come under, they scrambled to adjust to an abruptly changed world order, sometimes dropping the civil rights ball in the process.
In the fall of 2001, a landmark Anti-Terrorism Act became law over a single parliamentary trimester. With the backing of the Conservative opposition, the Liberals used their majority to curtail debate.
It was also in those initial few months that the country was committed to an open-ended war in Afghanistan, a commitment twice expanded by successive Liberal prime ministers in no small part to make it easier to fend off pressing American invitations to join the Iraq fray and the U.S. missile defence program.
The see-no-evil/hear-no-evil rules on detainee transfers from the Canadian Forces to the Afghan authorities that opened the door to abuse at the hands of local jailers were ratified by a Liberal government.
The decision to support the jailing of 15-year-old Omar Khadr in Guantanamo and the illegal CSIS interrogations that followed took place on the Liberal watch.
Chrétien was in power when Canadian engineer Maher Arar was taken off a plane in the United States and subsequently deported to torture chambers in Syria.
It was successive Liberal governments that initially refused to allow Abousfian Abdelrazik to return home from Sudan in 2003 — an exile forced on a Canadian citizen that was to last six years.
The Liberals were in power only for the first half of the past decade but they very much shaped post 9/11 Canada as we now know it.
In so doing they also (accidentally) set in motion a major realignment of the federal landscape,
The change in the channels triggered by the events of 9/11 provided conservatives of all partisan stripes with fresh common ground — distanced from the disputed terrain of the recent past — on which to focus.
It also brought a harder-edged Conservative leadership within the redefined mainstream of Canadian politics.
More importantly, the post 9/11 symbiosis between the Liberals and the Conservatives allowed the NDP and its contrary voice to become relevant again.
The last Liberal majority was earned in 2000, the last federal campaign of the pre-9/11 era.
In that election, the Canadian Alliance and the Tories together earned 37 per cent of the popular vote.
Last spring, a united Conservative party under Stephen Harper won its first majority with 39.6 of the vote.
Over the same period, the NDP went from 8.5 per cent in 2000 to 30.6 per cent last May — more than tripling its support over a decade.
Conventional wisdom notwithstanding, the events of 9/11 did not so much pave the way to a more conservative Canada as open the door to a more polarized and less Liberal country.
Origin
Source: Toronto Star
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