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Macleans.ca

Canada’s magazine

Tag Archives: Election Watched

Importing some o’ that Canada-style right-wing politics

A few weeks before our recent election unpleasantness began, I had lunch in Ottawa with Reihan Salam and Ross Douthat, two young U.S. Republican blogger/pundit types whose book, Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream competes with my own in the hard-fought category of Political Books With Really Long Subtitles. To caricature their argument, Douthat and Salam believe U.S. Republicans should seek to attract middle-class and working-class voters with families, roughly the kind of people who used to be called “Reagan Democrats,” with narrowly targeted bits of small-scale interventionist government policy, often tax benefits. In other words, they argue for Harper-Muttart micro-policy along the lines of the tool-belt tax credit Patrick Muttart used to get “Dougie’s” attention in the 2006 election. Or the ban on candied tobacco that helped get the party noticed by mothers this time around.

Canada-EU free trade

Not so much. “Sarkozy and Harper will sign something vague that commits to nothing.” What killed the momentum? The no-fixed-date federal election, is what. And that’s problematic, because the whole point of the strategy Jean Charest had been pursuing doggedly since early 2007 was that the best friend Canada could ever, ever have for these negotiations was a European presidency in the hands of Nicolas Sarkozy. That was only going to happen for the six months at the end of 2008 or, as we like to call them now, “the two months at the end of 2008.”

The Beginning After The End

Here’s the top of our Inside Story, the epic history of the 2008 federal election. The rest — six “chapters,” plus an epilogue — is in the current issue of Maclean’s. There is much to confound and amaze in there, including surprise cameo appearances by Nicolas Sarkozy’s press secretary and — and — well, I can’t say, but you’ll be confounded and amazed.