Angry in the Great White North

In the wake of the election results, many on Canada's Left are asking whether the Left ought to unite.  It is premised on the bizarre notion that while the Conservatives won 38% of the popular vote, 62% of Canadians voted against them.

By that reasoning, 74% of Canadians rejected the Liberals, and 82% rejected the NDP.

Not so fast, says our left-of-centre mathematics major.  He combines the Liberal and NDP vote, and claims that 44% of people voted for a left-of-centre platform, more than for a Conservative platform.

Hey, throw in the Green Party while you're at it, for a few percent more.

This is all nonsense, simply because you can't just combine them on the basis of both being left-of-centre.  It suggests that any left-of-centre political platform is equivalent to any other left-of-centre political platform.  I doubt many people in either the Liberal Party or the NDP or the Green Party would agree with that statement.

To make this sort of additive argument work, the various left-of-centre parties have to be truly merged.

The old Progressive Conservatives merged with the Canadian Alliance to form the Conservative Party of Canada, uniting the Right in 2003.  Couldn't the same happen on the Left?

I'm going to suggest that it is much harder to left-of-centre parties to merge than it is for right-of-centre parties to merge.  That's because, fundamentally, right-of-centre politics is about minimalism.  Minimal taxes to fund minimal services from a minimized government.  Of course, you can debate about what exactly constitutes the correct minimal set of government functions, but no matter what, each player in the unite-the-right effort is driving towards zero.  There is a natural convergence.

On the Left, however, the goal is to expand government.  The government will manage the environment.  The government will manage health care.  The government will manage child care.  The government will manage resource development.  The government will manage education.  The government will manage favoured industries.

There is a boundless range of possibilities for government interference, limited only by a willingness to raise taxes.

So for the Left, the problem is that political platforms are naturally divergent.  The Green Party focuses on the environment at the exclusion of all else.  The NDP wants programs aimed at unionized manufacturing.  The Liberals are the great social engineers, championing things like universal (or even mandatory) daycare.

How do you combine these parties?  Agreed, they are all considered left-of-centre, but that's about as similar as they get.  To unite them, the Green Party would have to give up on the primacy of environmentalism and allow the NDP's focus on support for the auto sector to become the defining party platform.  Or the NDP would have to drop support for union workers so that the Liberals can shift that money to farm subsidies.

See the problem?  For the Left, the problem is that each party thinks the other has the entirely wrong focus.  They all agree that the State is supposed to exist to tax aggressively and then use that money to directed government-run programs, but which programs?

And if the choice is either-or, because of a realization that the government really can't do everything without bankrupting the country, then some party in the hypothetical united Left is going to see its platform disappear.

Do you really see the Green Party uniting with the Liberals or the NDP under any circumstance in which the environment is not the single most important platform plank?

I don't see the Left uniting anytime soon.  Instead, there will be a process of cannibalization, if the Liberal Party disintegrates.  The Green Party and the NDP (and for that matter, the Conservatives) will simply absorb ex-Liberals looking for a new political home.

That's not uniting the left.  That's consolidation.  And it won't happen as long as the Liberal Party maintains some measure of political integrity (in the structural sense, not the ethical one).