A historical list could go on … and on, and on, etc. At or close to the top of my own would be Bruce Hutchison (1901–1992), who was born in (far) eastern Ontario, grew up in BC, and worked for the Victoria Times, the Winnipeg Free Press, and the Vancouver Sun. Probably his finest  book-length contribution to our local political literature was his 1952 biography of Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King, aptly entitled The Incredible Canadian — and currently available in a new 2011 edition, with an introduction by Vaughn Palmer.

At or close to the top of my own list of Mr. Hutchison’s still extant successors is John Ibbitson, who was born in 1955 in  the excellent small town of Gravenhurst, Ontario, educated (in English literature) at the University of Toronto, and is now Ottawa Bureau Chief for the Globe and Mail. I do not at all sympathize with Ibbitson’s broad ideological or philosophical posture (essentially right-wing and certainly conservative). But for some years now I have  found his newspaper writing on first Ontario regional and then Canadian federal politics not just instructive but frequently stimulating, intermittently admirably high-minded, and often enough rooted in some attractively deeper grasp of our sometimes all too complex (far) northern North American geographic moods.

John Ibbitson at the Eden Mills Writers’ Festival in Ontario, September 19, 2010.

Two current Ibbitson pieces — one from Monday’s Globe and Mail print edition (“Harper’s moment to entrench Conservative politics has arrived”) and the other first posted on the newspaper’s website at 6 AM EDT Tuesday morning (“Are opposition parties’ calls for change falling on deaf ears?”) — nicely illustrate his unique contemporary genius. They also suggest, I think, a potential shift of focus for all we ardent Canadian political junkie-observers of 2011. Ottawa (as Mr. Harper has always wanted?) is becoming less and less interesting. The real action is moving to the provinces, and that may be where it will stay for some time? It has been in the provinces, after all, that  the Canadian service state of the later 20th century has for the most part arisen. And that is probably where most of its fate in the earlier 21st century will be decided.

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Manitoba NDP premier Greg Selinger on the campaign trail, September 14, 2011. Photo — Ross Romaniuk, Winnipeg Sun.

No one is always perfect. I found John Ibbitson’s ruminations on “Harper’s moment to entrench Conservative politics has arrived”— keyed to the start of the parliamentary session in Ottawa on Monday —  a bit drab and perfunctory. But that may not really be Ibbitson’s fault. The central message of the piece is that (even with less than 40% of the Canada-wide popular vote, I would still stress myself) PM Harper at last has a majority of seats in the Canadian House of Commons, and can now more or less do what we have long known he wants to do all too well. Ho hum, etc.

On the other hand, Tuesday’s “Are opposition parties’ calls for change falling on deaf ears?” has reminded me of just why I admire John Ibbitson’s writing on the Canadian political scene as much as I do. It deals in a provocative and striking way with the provincial election campaigns currently in motion in Ontario, Manitoba, Newfoundland and Labrador, PEI, and “Saskatchewan (and Alberta, sort of).”

The beginning and end of the piece nicely summarize its main theme — which puts a crisp finger on something that has at least some intriguing grains of truth about it, and has not been widely recognized, I think — at least as yet: “In provincial elections across the country, incumbency now seems to be an asset everywhere. Mere co-incidence, or have voters decided that the upheavals of the May 2 federal election are enough change for one year? … in every province where an election is underway, the incumbents – Kathy Dunderdale in Newfoundland, Robert Ghiz in PEI, Dalton McGuinty in Ontario, Greg Selinger in Manitoba and Brad Wall in Saskatchewan – have reason to feel encouraged. Time for a change? Maybe not so much.”

Public sector union activists prepare for October 6, 2011 Ontario election at Kempenfeldt Bay on Lake Simcoe. Nice work if you can get it?

This isn’t all that’s going on in Canadian regional politics at the moment, as best as I can make out. In some other degree, at any rate, it’s not just change or upheaval in the abstract that voters are starting to wonder about: it’s still more movement to the right. (Saskatchewan and Newfoundland don’t quite fit this second reading on the surface, but these surfaces are misleading. The incumbent Conservatives are well ahead on the Rock, eg, but the NDP has moved past the Liberals in the latest poll. And then remember alleged right-wing Saskatchewan Premier Brad Wall’s virtually socialist position of 2010, on the province’‘s potash industry.)

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Federal CCF Party delegation attending the conference of Commonwealth Labour Parties in London, England, September 1944. Left to right : Clarie Gillis, David Lewis, M.J. Coldwell, Percy E. Wright, and Frank Scott.

Whatever else, there is certainly something to John Ibbitson’s “incumbency hypothesis” on what’s happening in the fall 2011 Canadian provincial election campaigns. And it is one of the various high virtues of his inspirational Canadian political writing that it can get you thinking your own higher thoughts.

I have found myself thinking about another name from my historical list of very good people who have watched over and written on the Canadian political scene. The suspect here is F.R. “Frank” Scott (1899–1985), born and bred in anglophone Quebec, and a “poet, lawyer and social philosopher” who for “more than forty years … helped to form the Canada we know today.” And I am thinking in particular about a workmanlike volume he prepared for the British Commonwealth Relations Conference of 1938, entitled Canada Today : A Study of Her National Interests and National Policy.

Maurice Duplessis (left), premier of Quebec, and Mitch Hepburn (right), premier of Ontario, in the later 1930s, at Hepburn’s Elgin County farm.

In a chapter of this late 1930s volume on the “Nationalist Movement in French Canada” Frank Scott wrote about “a new provincial party” in Quebec, “the Union Nationale, which has been in power since 1936, and … is pledged to give to the French Canadian the place in Confederation which he feels has been denied him. Its leader is Maurice Duplessis … His activities since taking office have been varied but always colourful. He and his fellow premiers , Mr. Hepburn of Ontario and Mr. Aberhart of Alberta, provide the only vigorous — if erratic — leadership to be found in Canadian politics today.”

Some 73 years later, a British part-time student of the global economy has been telling us about a “failure of political will both in the EU and US which is starting to make the contemporary economic scene resemble that of the 1930s.”  It may be, John Ibbitson’s “incumbency hypothesis” has finally made me think, that in Canada we are starting to develop some political resemblances to Frank Scott’s Canada of the 1930s as well.

Bible Bill Aberhart, premier of Alberta — on the radio in the 1930s.

Or, you might say, the more Stephen Harper actually does manage to perpetrate his long-heralded designs on the Canadian body politic of the early 21st century, the less important his own role in Ottawa will become. And the more we will start looking to such provincial politicians as “Kathy Dunderdale in Newfoundland, Robert Ghiz in PEI, Dalton McGuinty in Ontario, Greg Selinger in Manitoba and Brad Wall in Saskatchewan,” for “the only vigorous … leadership … in Canadian politics today.”

History, as has been so memorably said by another poet of another time and place, “has many cunning passages.”

The late great Bruce Hutchison’s The Unknown Country: Canada and Her People was first published in 1942. It was republished last year, with a new introduction by Vaughn Palmer of the Vancouver Sun.

At our regular Monday morning editorial meeting today one of the most senior editors drearily opined that bumping into the latest daily Nanos poll on the Canadian federal election of 2011 (“Tories enter second week with commanding 14-point lead”) called forth this distressing (and depressing) thought:

“If this poll is to be believed, the Harper Conservatives do seem on their way to an actual majority of seats in the elected branch of the  Parliament of Canada — based on much less than a majority of the cross-country popular vote, of course. And nothing we do or say on this obscure website is going to make a difference!”

Another voice at the meeting said it was still far too early to give up hope. For one thing, she had just yesterday bumped into a memorable tweet from “thinking cartoonist/animator sluggin’ it out during the harper years in downtown MTL” rick thomas (aka rikipedia): “the Conservative Party of Canada : fostering fear and hatred among Canadians for a better tomorrow…what could possibly go wrong”?

It is not as if there is nothing in the media to suggest that PM Harper ought to be in more trouble than he apparently is. The Macleans site today has two pointed “questions for Stephen Harper” that underline his blatant storytelling about his own “coalition” adventures in 2004. The “latest revelations” on Bruce Carson “raise new questions about Mr. Harper’s judgment in hiring Mr. Carson as his chief policy analyst and troubleshooter” — even if Mr. Harper “says he was never told of Mr. Carson’s full criminal record.” (And our own introduction to this case, “A pretty girl is like a melody .. has Canadian election of 2011 finally arrived on back of first ever contempt of Parliament censure?, did win some fresh attention over the weekend.)

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“A recent poll found that 57 per cent of Canadian adults are ‘certain’ to vote, says Darrell Bricker, CEO of public affairs for Ipsos Reid. He says the proportion of people who respond this way tends to correspond closely to actual turnout.” According to other studies, this kind of low turnout will most likely favour the Conservatives. Photo: Patrick Price, Reuters.

And then just yesterday the latest report on the daily Nanos intelligence was headlined “Conservatives lose ground in poll.” Another report on a different compilation of recent survey research had indicated “Tory majority still out of reach despite first-week gains, polls suggest.” It is true that the Nanos results for the day before had suggested “Canada’s Conservatives gain ground in new poll.” But for her own good reasons the often savvy Chantal Hébert was nonetheless concluding: “This campaign could lead to a cliff-hanger.”

It is no doubt also a sign of something that you can put together your own vaguely amusing collections of more or less contradictory media headlines and deeper news reports. Just yesterday, eg, a Postmedia News article in the Vancouver Sun was headlined: “Low voter turnout expected in federal election ‘about nothing’.”  But just a week before another Postmedia News report in the same publication had enthused: “Political ground shifts as Canadians head into exciting campaign … In the end, the verdict by Canadian voters on election night could have long-term implications for Canadian history. A Conservative majority would signify, after years of voter distrust of Harper, that the balance of power is shifting in Ottawa.”

PM Harper’s one-time “Mr. Fixit,” Bruce Carson, in happier days. Mr. Harper now says he would never have hired Mr. Carson if he had known about his “full criminal record.”

Just yesterday as well, John Ibbitson in the Globe and Mail was advising that the new Ignatieff Liberal “Family Pact” campaign platform proposes “Canada should return to its Trudeauesque past of increased social spending paid for by higher taxes on corporations and the wealthy” — an alleged stark contrast to “the Conservative emphasis on keeping taxes low while balancing the books.”  On the same day Althia Raj and Mike De Souza offered a quite different-sounding characterization of the same platform document in the Vancouver Sun: “Liberals unveil election platform, plan to slash spending, increase corporate taxes … The federal Liberals will slash spending, increase taxes for the rich, encourage homeowners to make green renovations and allow citizens to vote online according to details of their election platform released Sunday.”

At the end of our editorial meeting this morning there was some consensus on the den mother’s suggestion that, whatever else, even a bare Harper majority government at last just might finally convince the various powers that be on the progressive side of the Canadian political spectrum to set aside their own petty self-interests, and seriously reorganize for the common good of the common people. And this will or at least could re-mobilize the actual decisive majority of Canadian voters, who (even in Mr. Harper’s very best poll results) continue to NOT support “the Conservative Party of Canada : fostering fear and hatred among Canadians for a better tomorrow…what could possibly go wrong”?  And then Mr. Harper’s party — and its “curious attack on majority rule” in our democratic institutions — will finally get the defeat it deserves in the Canadian federal election of 2015: just in time for the 150th anniversary of the diverse Canadian confederation in 2017.

Canada’s Mohawk poetess Pauline E. Johnson, aka Tekahionwake (1861-1913), born on the Grand River Six Nations Reserve in Ontario, died in Vancouver, BC. Her grave remains in Stanley Park to this day.

Meanwhile, there are still a full four weeks to go in the campaign for the Canadian federal election of 2011.  And we have also resolved not to give up all hope just yet. This is the first federal election campaign in Canada for which we have had such a thing as a daily Nanos poll. And who knows what it will finally prove to mean — especially at the start of the second week of a five-week campaign. We will continue to hope passionately for a more authentically democratic result even this time around, and do as much as we possibly can to help bring it about. (Granted, again, that is not very much: but we are trying, and working hard. And if many small voices sing as loud as they can,  that will sometimes move the Rocky Mountains, and the Canadian Shield, and the beautiful Cape Breton Highlands, that go down to the edge of the sea … etc, etc, etc, etc!)

The very bottom line to our continuing concern about a Harper Conservative majority government in 2011 is that it will make the late, great Bruce Hutchinson’s The Unknown Country, Canada and Her People (first published in 1942, and just last summer released in a new edition with an introduction by Vaughn Palmer) still more unknown — even or especially to those of us who are so lucky as to live within its borders. It is part of Mr. Harper’s strategy for winning political debates, as his biographer Lawrence Martin reminded us recently, to (no doubt quite cleverly) indulge in the deft manipulation of “Smoke and mirrors. The creation of a fictional universe.” And, to indulge in some minor fearmongering of our own, we are concerned about another symposium on “Canada: The Unknown Country” — published by the American Political Science Association, to shed light among Pauline Johnson’s “Yankees to the south of us” on “the recent 2006 Canadian federal election—which saw Stephen Harper and the Conservatives dislodge the Liberal Party.” Like so many US discussions of the true north strong and free, even in the early 21st century, this 2006 symposium concluded with a canvassing of “the issues that would likely be discussed should all or part of Canada wish—however likely or unlikely this may be—to become part of the United States someday.”