Canadian conservatives should curb their enthusiasm !

Canada, US northern neighbor, is profoundly liberal and on the left, by northern american standards. It has three major national political parties, Liberals, New Democrats and Progressives Conservatives and a regional party, the Bloc Québecois who advocate the separation of Quebec, the francophone province from the rest of Canada. Also, the Progressives Conservatives are seen by canadians as a regional party because after Conservatives lost the elections in 1994, they disappeared from the political scene and emerged only two years ago by morphing with the former candian Alliance party, a regional extreme right from the west. The deal was brokered by the chiefs of the two parties against the will of most Conservative militants: rescuscitate the Conservatives in exchange for some national credibilty for the more powerful Alliance.

In yesterday's elections, the new party, Progressives Conservatives (an oxymore), led by Stephen Harper, an economist from Alberta and an old Alliance member who advocate a rapprochement with the Bush administration, an increased military budget, tax cuts and social conservatism, show that they are still struggling. They won most of their seats from the two western provinces, Alberta, an oil producing province and the Prairies. They didn't win any seat in the three major canadian cities, Toronto, Montréal and Vancouver.

For the last 12 years, canadians have been electing liberals to the government and they only voted reluctantly for Conservatives giving them only 124 seats in parliament when the needed majority is of 155 seats. All other parties can be considered to the left of the conservatives: the Bloc with 51 seats, although being a collection of divergent political tendencies united by separatism, has a strong leftist component, his chief is an ancient leftist militant and the New Democrats, canada's declared leftist party won 29 seats yesterday.

What is interesting is that despite fraud and conflict of interest accusations riddling the Liberal party for the last two years before and during the electoral campaign, liberals didn't lose their grip on canadian society. Indeed, canadians being more and more wary of: 1) the nightmare the US citizens are experiencing with the Bush administration, 2) the international and regional political contexts as neighbors of an oil hungry, war-mongerer, imperialism thirsty neighbor to the south, 3) their social reality which is multicultural, peacful and human rights respectful, 4) the strong anti-war stance and demonstrations exhibited by canadians in the run-up to the Iraq war, have voted, in my opinion, on values.

Contrary to the US where Republicans got the lead in the war on values, it is the left in Canada who holds this lead and determine on what values canadians should elect their representatives.