THERE was a time in the formative years of the Conservative coalition that now governs Canada when popular votes on single issues were all the rage.
The Reform party and later the Reform Alliance favoured referenda, MP recall votes, you name it. The people should rule and how better to give them their say than through binding direct votes?
Athenian democracy loomed, but without the slave underclass to do all the work while we citizens concerned ourselves with the day-to-day issues of governing.
It was the heyday of populist sentiment in the prairie-based movement with roots back to the American democracy-influenced Social Credit party of the 1930s in Alberta. Given that history, government critics sometimes puzzle over the Conservative refusal to commit to a producer vote over the fate of the Canadian Wheat Board monopoly.
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Isn’t this the party of popular power? Isn’t this the party that promised to let the people into government, (never mind the small legal inconvenience that the Canadian Wheat Board Act requires a producer plebiscite before mandate changes are made)?
Obviously, they are afraid of a vote because they know they would lose, goes the critics’ theory.
Well, legal inconvenience aside (a CWB law passed by the 35th Parliament can be amended by a future Parliament, specifically one that follows the 2007 election, the 40th Parliament), this Conservative party long ago threw that populist stuff overboard.
Its position on a producer vote is consistent with its ideology, never mind the prospects of winning or losing.
Stephen Harper does not agree with direct democracy and this is his party.
In the early days of Reform, when Preston Manning was the guiding light and promoted the populist ideology, Harper was a young conservative policy wonk with some deep differences with the leader.
He did not agree with populism, particularly a populism that depended on the outsider opinions of westerners who felt alienated from the national power exercised by central Canadian elites.
The key to Harper’s political vision, University of Calgary political scientist and Reform insider Tom Flanagan wrote in 1995, was to propose policies that would attract disaffected rural and urban voters whose core values were family, market economics and patriotism.
There would be no issue-by-issue votes, just policies that would attract voters and that would then be judged at election time.
For the Harper government, the wheat board monopoly is an issue about “the market economy,” in Flanagan’s phrase, and not about popularity. This is what they want to do as part of a broader policy to reduce size of government and scope of regulation.
In effect, Harper is telling voters: judge us on our package approach, not on each issue.
Of course, if the Conservatives thought a vote on the wheat board would be a slam dunk, they just might be tempted to call one, if for no other reason than to silence articulate critics like Stewart Wells and Wayne Easter.
But rest assured that as long as the rules say a permit book holder with 300 acres and little interest in marketing issues has the same vote as someone with 5,000 acres and a marketing plan for other crops, there will be no Conservative-called CWB plebiscite.
Stephen Harper would not approve.
