The Canadian federal election in October confirmed a long-term, leftward trend in Canadian politics. Despite Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s blackface scandal, the Liberals retained power, winning a plurality of 157 out of 338 seats and 33.1 percent of the popular vote. Conservatives won 121 seats (34.4 percent of the vote), gaining truly overwhelming support from Western Canada, particularly from the provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan.
While the sovereigntist Bloc Québécois won 32 seats in Quebec (7.7 percent of the country-wide vote), the lynchpin of the Liberal’s retention of power is the New Democratic Party (NDP), Canada’s social democrats, which won 24 seats (and 15.9 percent of the popular vote).
During the last five-and-a-half decades, the Canadian Right has failed to articulate a counter-ethic to the now-dominant Liberal idea of Canada, such that it cannot even defeat a prime minister self-wounded by a multitude of gaffes, corruption scandals, and blackface embarrassments, all of which seemed to have comparatively little impact on the election’s outcome.
Trudeau’s father, Pierre Elliott Trudeau, prime minister for almost the entire period between 1968 and 1984, can claim credit as the architect of the present left-liberal Canada. Pierre Trudeau had been a Communist sympathizer, but ended up becoming an exemplary left-liberal and “cultural Marxist”...