The Monday night election defeat of Stephen Harper, the Conservative prime minister of Canada, and the triumph of his most hated rival, the Liberal leader Justin Trudeau, gave many Canadians that rush of feeling they so rarely enjoy: “It’s a girl.” “The lab says it’s benign.” “Your long national nightmare is over.”
But after what was seen here as a painfully protracted 11-week campaign, we are more relieved than triumphant. (It’s a different high than Americans might have after an election: How do you tolerate an almost permanent level of high-cortisol stress?)
It’s not that Canada has the same impossibly high expectations of Mr. Trudeau that Americans had of President Obama. At the risk of sounding like a broken human after almost 10 years of Harper rule, I suspect that Canadians simply ask that Mr. Trudeau, a centrist, not be like his predecessor. Behold, we are already pleased!
For Mr. Harper began turning Canada into a place we didn’t recognize. It wasn’t Trudeaumania, it was Harper-phobia, as one writer said the morning after.
It’s too simple to say that Mr. Harper was trying to Americanize Canada. That is rather insulting to Americans, and anyway Mr. Harper, no internationalist, seemed bored by Americans, although he tagged along with them on their pointless bombing wars.
In the United States, divisions between, say, regions or parties seem reasonably matched. Mr. Harper was doing something different. He was enabling bullying on a national scale. He won three elections because he relied on his full right-wing base but also pressed buttons Canadians don’t like to admit they have: lowering taxes, deploring immigrants, sidelining women and hyping militarism.
Ultimately Mr. Harper’s problem in this election was that he couldn’t win nationally with just an older, white male, rural base. He had to extend his reach, was weirdly unwilling to do that and ended up holding tiny rallies of Conservative voters, while Mr. Trudeau was meeting everyone, anyone. Two days before the election, a desperate Mr. Harper was reduced to appearing in public with Rob Ford, the notorious ex-mayor of Toronto. The photos were excruciating.
Mr. Harper’s bullying was extreme, and it was high schoolish. In 2011, his government barred women from wearing niqabs, the face-covering scarves, during citizenship ceremonies. The problem was that there appeared to be only one or two women trying to do this. The one giving interviews seemed quite nice. Then, more recently, women in niqabs began to be tormented on the streets. This shocked us.
The scroll of what Mr. Harper didn’t like grew longer as the years passed. It comprised scientists, environmentalists, returning veterans, urbanites, immigrants, then immigrants with accents, refugee claimants, then claimants needing health care, and so on. Bubbles of despised people began popping up. At some point the bubbles would have joined up and made Canada a vast blister for Mr. Harper to target. It was becoming absurd.
For Canadians are different from Americans, and we like it that way. We don’t think we’re exceptional; in fact, it’s rather important to us that we’re not, because that would imply that other nations are below par, which would be quite rude. We are a vast, cold country with a small population of about 36 million (Mr. Harper canceled the mandatory census, so we’re not sure about the number), and it is essential for Canadians to connect with and help one another. Mr. Trudeau understands that; Mr. Harper did not.
Mr. Harper fatally referred to “old-stock Canadians,” which was taken to mean “white” in a young country that has been peopled by immigrants, with many more being welcomed to come here. In his victory speech, Mr. Trudeau said definitively “a Canadian is a Canadian is a Canadian,” a charming contrast to Mr. Harper’s classifications of lesser citizens.
It’s also too easy to say that Mr. Harper was dour and that the younger Mr. Trudeau was cheerful. Mr. Harper spent government money on a grand scale while cutting business and personal taxes. But money doesn’t come first here. We’re ambitious. We pay healthy taxes to support a national single-payer health care system, the jewel of our country.
We want more. As drug prices soar, we need a universal drug plan, too. It will have to be paid for, and a national plan will provide it in the cheapest and most efficient way. Mr. Harper wouldn’t do that. While handing out a great deal of pork, it sometimes seemed he killed more useful spending out of doctrinaire spite.
Take guns, and you may. We have rifles and other long guns but spend time alone with them in the woods to kill wild animals. What other purpose would there be for rifles? Our gun control included a national long-gun registry that assisted battered women and local police forces; Mr. Harper killed it, saying it was an invasion of privacy.
Mr. Trudeau is different. He is a better match for Canadians’ vision of themselves: peaceable, educated, emotionally stable, multicultural.
Mr. Harper always seemed like the unpopular kid standing on the sidelines planning his revenge on a nation. He wasn’t brilliant, he was cunning. He took his revenge. We’re done.
“It’s not about me,” Mr. Harper said bleakly as the campaign neared its end, knowing that it was in fact all about him.
We are not seeking grandeur with Mr. Trudeau. What we want is an honest repairman, and we’ll take it from there. Americans, thank you for your patience.
Heather Mallick is a staff columnist for The Toronto Star.